Translation of long sentences in French into Chinese

In Chinese, we often encounter situations where a long paragraph is divided into many short sentences by commas or semicolons. This is more common in literary works, such as the following paragraph: "What is literature? Literature is a sublime Chinese painting, where you can admire the white clouds and blue sky, the rushing rivers and streams with bright eyes; literature is a melodious ancient melody, where you can listen to the songs of birds, the murmuring of spring water with closed eyes and focused mind; literature is a colorful garden of various flowers, where you can breathe in the rich fragrance of peonies, the refreshing scent of chrysanthemums." 

However, in French, sentences are considered beautiful when they are long and not separated, sometimes even a complete sentence can be a paragraph on its own. For example, the following sentence: "The French Revolution of 1789, by recognizing the people as the only legitimate source of national sovereignty, made it necessary to establish a public education service in order to educate the French for citizenship."

This reflects the different standards of sentence structure between Chinese and French: Chinese values the collocation of words and the rhythm of sentences, while French emphasizes the logical relationships within sentences. This can be quite challenging for Chinese speakers who are not familiar with long sentences, causing impatience at the sight of lengthy paragraphs. So, is there a trick to translating such long sentences?

For this, we rely on the three-word rule of "subject-verb-object" brought by linguistics, the greatest wealth of humanity. This method, commonly used in our childhood Chinese language classes, is still effective in foreign language learning. Once the subject, verb, and object of a sentence are identified, the key to unlocking the sentence is found, and the rest of the parts will quickly fall into place according to logical relationships. For example, in the above sentence, we can easily identify the main part of the sentence, namely:

Subject: "La Révolution française de 1789" 

Object: "l’instauration"

Verb structure: "a rendu nécessaire" which translates to "The French Revolution of 1789 made it necessary."

What kind of establishment? The creation of a public education service, that is: "The French Revolution of 1789 made it necessary to establish a system of public education." To make the sentence smoother, it can be modified to: "The French Revolution of 1789 required the establishment of a public education service system in France."

Next, there are two remaining parts ", en reconnaissant le peuple comme seule source légitime de la souveraineté nationale," and "afin de former les Français à exercice de la citoyenneté." The first part is more complex, usually in French and English, explanatory parts are enclosed in two commas or dashes inserted in the middle of the sentence. Therefore, in daily translation, I have summarized two methods.

The first method is to use the Chinese "——" to replace the French "," or "-" so that the explanatory part is still inserted in the middle. Although this method can express the meaning of the sentence fairly clearly, it may not be suitable for formal articles due to not conforming to Chinese reading habits. Using this method, the above sentence can be translated as: "The French Revolution of 1789 - recognizing the people as the sole legitimate source of national sovereignty - required France to create a system of public education services to better fulfill the rights of citizens."

The second method I have summarized is flexible translation. Although the inserted part is usually supplementary information, it can also have causal, parallel, consequential, or sequential relationships with the preceding and following sentences. In such cases, translations can be done flexibly based on the sentence context. For example, the above sentence can be translated as: "The French Revolution of 1789 made people realize that the people are the only legitimate source of national sovereignty, which required France to establish a system of public education services to enable the French people to better exercise their citizenship rights."

Another point to note is that French long sentences often involve inversion, which is a natural result of the object being too long. The example sentence above is no exception. For example, the usual usage of "rendre" is "rendre un chemin praticable", where the object appears before the adjective, but in this case, "l’instauration d’un service public d’éducation" is placed after "nécessaire". Once this concept is understood, it is not difficult to grasp, as long as one keeps in mind the possibility of inversion.

◀️：Understanding Sentence Structure for Better Translation

▶️：Translating Foreign Language Poetry and Lyrics