《Translation skill》.doc

Translation skill: long sentences The translation of long sentence is prehaps the most difficult of all in the process of English-Chinese translation. The prerequisites for the correct handling of long and complex sentences in English-Chinese translation lie chiefly in the translator’s correct comprehension of the original, and secondly, in his/her ability to adequately represent the thought of the author in the target language. Correct comprehension, therefore, is always the first and foremost step; and the dialectical(adj.辩证的) unity of faithfulness and smoothness is always what we should strive to achieve. This means we have to begin with a careful analysis of a long and complex sentence in the light of context so as to understand it clearly: (a) what the author is driving at;(b) what his/her argument or views are, and what “logic sequence ” there is in the original;(c) what grammatical relations exist among the three,four,five or even more “modifiers” in the long sentence to be translated. As some linguists have pointed out, the translation of a typical long english sentence usually consists of two stages which comprises six or seven steps: StageⅠ Comprehension Step1: draft a skeleton(基干) of the long sentence Step2: infer(推断) the main idea from the context and the whole text Step3: distinguish between the principal and subordinate elements Step4: find out the interrelations between principal and subordinate clauses StageⅡ Presentation Step5: enter on a tentative(试探性的) translation of each sentence division Step6: rearrangement and synthesis Step7: finishing touches(润色) Let us analyze the above seven steps in the following illustration. It is nothing else than impurities prenatally inherent in ore that seriously affect the quality of the ore, which is fromed as a result of geological vicissitudes(变迁兴衰) including diastrophic(地壳) movement, eruption of volcano, sedimentation, glaciation(冰河作用) and weathering etc., under the action of which pyrogenic(高热所产生的) rocks, volc