-hist
English-Chinses Translation
09
英语
1
班
陈宇
2
Qinggong
College
Hebei United University
October , 2011
The
Comparison between English and Chinese
I.
Synthetic VS
Analytic
A synthetic language is
characterized by frequent and systematic use of
inflected
forms to express grammatical
relationships.
An analytic language is
marked by a relatively frequent use of functions
words,
auxiliary verbs, and charges in
word order to express syntactic relations, rather
than of inflected forms.
English is a synthetic-analytic
language.
Chinese is a typical analytic
language.
1.
In
English
nouns,
pronouns,
and
verbs
are
inflected,
Chinese
is
non-inflectional.
The
above
grammatical
meanings
are
mostly
implied
in
contexts or between the lines.
The English
inflection, though few in numbers, are an integral
and essential part
of
the
language.
The
excessive
frequency
of
these
forms
gives
them
great
morphological weight.
We
cannot but accept Sayce’s dictum, “once
inflectional,
always
inflectional”.
Hence,
while
English
appears
as
almost
uninflectional
when compared
with
such a language as
Latin,
it appears in
the opposite light
when
compared with an isolating language such as
Chinese.
2. Word order in English is
not so rigid as in Chinese. More ways of
inversion,
grammatical or rhetorical
are often seen in English.
The
flexible
word
order
in
English
is
mainly
the
result
of
the
grammatical
concord of words
in the sentence which is achieved by inflection.
When expressing temporal
or
logical
sequences,
English
may make full use of
inflections and
function
words
to
make its word order
flexible, while Chinese,
with
the
help
of
function
words,
arranges
its
word
order
according
to
certain
rules of temporal or
logical sequences.
3.
English
functions
words
include
the
articles,
prepositions,
auxiliary
verbs,
coordinators and subordinators, while
Chinese function words include particles,
connectives,
and
prepositions.
Each
has
its
own
features
in
the
use
of
these
words.
Chinese
is
rich
in
particles,
which
can
be
classified
into
aspect
particles,
structural
particles,
and
emotional
particles.
The
frequent
use
of
Chinese
particles is a hard nut for foreign
learners of Chinese.
Eg.
这回我可亲眼看见啦！
This time I’ve actually seen it for
myself.
English has a large
number of prepositions and prepositional phrases
which are
often in use, which Chinese
has a few prepositions which are mostly “borrowed”
from their corresponding verbs. A
conversion of English perversion of English
prepositions into Chinese verbs is
often necessary.
Eg. Peter drew his
knife on the robber.
彼得拔刀向那个强盗砍去。
4.
English frequently uses its various connectives,
coordinating or subordinating,
including conjunctive and relative
pronouns or adverbs, such as who, whose, that,
what,
which,
when,
where,
why,
and
how.
Chinese
has
no
such
kind
of
conjunctives
and
relatives,
and
other
connectives
are
not
often
used,
except
in
formal writings.
Eg. Practically all substances expand
when heated and contract when cooled.
几
乎所有的物质都是热胀冷缩的。
English is an intonation language while
Chinese is a tone language. One of the
important
features
in
modern
Chinese
is
the
predominance
of
disyllables
and
quadrisyllables over monosyllables and
trisyllables. As a result, reduplication of
characters,
repetition
of
words,
four-
character
expressions,
and
parallelism
of
syllables,
words,
phrases,
and
sentence
structures
have
popular
Chinese
grammatical and
rhetorical devices.
II. Rigid VS Supple
English
subject-predicate
structure
appears
rigid
as
a
result
of
certain
grammatical
bonds,
including
the
patternization
and
the
principles
of
grammatical and notional concord.
Chinese,
however,
is
relatively
free
from
the
government
of
S-V
concord
and
formal markers. The subject-predicate
structure is usually varied,
flexible,
and
therefore complicated and supple.
Eg. The article has been translated.
文章翻译完了。
More
ambiguity
can
be
found
in
Chinese
due
to
the
lack
of
connectives,
inflections and
other grammatical markers.
1.
他欠你的钱（他
+
欠你钱
/
他欠你的
+
钱）
2.
准备了两年的食物（准备了两年
的
+
食物
/
准
备了
+
两年的食物）
III. Hypotactic VS Paratactic
Hypotaxis
is
the
dependent
or
subordinate
construction
or
relationship
of
clauses with connectives,
for example, I shall despair if you don’t come.
English
sentence building is featured
by hypotaxis.
Parataxis
is
the
arranging
of
clauses
one
after
the
other
without
connectives
showing the relations between them, for
example, The rain fell; the river flooded;
the house washed away. Chinese sentence
building is featured by parataxis.
To
clarify the relations between words, phrases or
clauses, English more often
resorts to
overt cohesion, frequently using various cohesive
ties such as relatives,
connectives,
prepositions, and some others.
Eg. All was cleared up some time later
when news came from a distant place
that an earthquake was felt the very
day the little copper ball fell.
过了一些时<
/p>
候，从远方传来了消息：在小铜球坠落的当天，确实发生了地震。这一切终
于得到了澄清！
By
contrast,
Chinese
more
frequently
relies
on
covert
coherence
and
context,
focusing on
temporal or logical sequences. Instead of using
various cohesive ties
such as
relatives, connectives and prepositions as in
English, Chinese more often
resorts to
word order, contracted sentences, four-character
expressions, and some