Analysis and Handling of Long and Complex Sentences in English-Chinese Translation

Many translators and English learners have faced the following situation to varying degrees—when encountering long and complex sentences in English, they recognize every word but cannot understand the meaning of the sentence. In fact, compared to Chinese, English has a large number of morphological changes, and the more morphological changes a language has, the more flexible and inverted its word order tends to be. Additionally, English frequently uses a rich array of conjunctions, complex sentence structures, and embedded clauses, making it even more challenging to grasp the meaning of a sentence.

Understanding, as an essential prerequisite in the translation process, requires translators to scientifically and accurately analyze and grasp the structure and meaning of sentences. Based on this, they can further elaborate and express the understood content according to the characteristics and expression methods of the Chinese language. There are not many main sentence patterns in English, and all variations stem from the same foundation. As long as one masters the methods of analyzing long and complex sentences and the strategies for translation, many problems can be easily solved.

Firstly, it is necessary to separate the main parts and modifiers in a sentence to reveal its basic structure. The main points for dividing English sentences include punctuation marks, relative pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, infinitives, and participles. Punctuation marks are the most obvious signs for division. What follows a colon or dash is mostly explanatory and helps us quickly grasp the main structure of the sentence. It is also worth noting the use of double commas. If the space between double commas contains an adverbial or prepositional phrase, or if the main-verb structure is separated before and after the double commas, then the content between them is usually a parenthetical element. Relative pronouns include who, whose, that, which, what, when, where, why, how, etc., used to connect the subject and the clause. Conjunctions such as and, or, but, yet, however, while, since, lest, so...that are often used to connect words, phrases, and clauses. Prepositions include simple prepositions (like with, of, about, though), compound prepositions (like upon, within, without, inside), and phrasal prepositions (like apart from, because of, on behalf of, with regard to). Infinitive phrases (to do) can act as adjectives or adverbs; the participle forms of verbs include present participles and past participles, which can be used as modifiers such as adjectives or adverbs. For example, consider the sentence: "He knew how ashamed he would have been if she had known his mother and the kind of place in which he was born, and the kind of people among whom he was born." The first step is to identify the division markers in the sentence (how, if, and, in which, among whom) and divide the sentence accordingly. The second step is to clarify the sentence structure, find the predicate verbs (knew, would have been, had known, was born), and then find the relative pronouns and conjunctions (how, if, which, whom). The verb without a relative pronoun or conjunction in front of it is the predicate verb of the main clause. In this way, it can be determined that the main clause of this long sentence is "He knew" with a how-introduced exclamatory sentence as the object clause, which also includes a conditional adverbial clause introduced by if, a relative clause modifying place introduced by in which, and a relative clause modifying people introduced by among whom. After analysis, following the Chinese habit of placing conditions before results, this sentence can be translated in reverse order: "He was born among such people, he was born in such a place, he had such a mother; if she had known about these, he knew how ashamed he would have been."

It can be seen that the most primary step in translating long and complex sentences is to clarify the internal structure and logical relationships of the sentence, simplifying the complex sentence. Then, it will be easier and more accurate to further express the content.

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