When I read some English articles, especially when we handle the translation, I found it’s a bit arduous while facing some long sentences. The complexity logical and structure made these sentences are quite difficult to understand.

In the English translation learning process, the translation of long sentences is one of difficult aspects for English-Chinese translation. it often made the translators lose their heads .

The characteristics of long sentences in English are: complex structure, strong logic, many levels and additional components. Thus, these made the translation very difficult. Still there are some solutions to make the translation of long sentences more concise.

No matter how long the sentence is, how complex the structure is, they are still composed by some basic ingredients. As long as we figure out the syntactic structure of the original English sentences, and find the center contents and the meaning of all levels.

Then analyze the logical relationship between the meanings of all layers, then we can make the translation of the whole sentence as per the characteristics of Chinese language and expressions. we should always remember the syntactic structure differences between Chinese and English.

Read Also: How to translate the prep. “About”

Generally speaking, a long sentence is composed by subordinate clauses. There are three categories of clauses in English:

Firstly. Noun clause: clause can be divided into subject, object clause, predicative clause and appositive clause

Secondly. Attributive clause.

Thirdly. Adverbial clause: adverbial clauses can be divided into time, place, adverbial clauses, adverbial clause conditions and so on.

All of the above clause has its iconic conjunction, but sometimes it will be omitted in some clause.

In the object clause, it often omitted the word “that”
In the attributive clause, when the relative pronoun being as a object in the clause, they can be omitted. relative pronoun Often be omitted are “that”, “which”, “whom”.

I think as long as we figure out the meaning of each clause, then it will be easy to catch the whole meaning.
During the translation process of long sentence, I think there are some methods can play a significant role:

Firstly, Translating follow as the sequence

It’s a direct translation way, following the order in accordance with the original sentence. When the contents in the logic, sequence and structural level are consistent with the Chinese thinking, we can use this translation method.

Reverse translation

we made the translation as per the reverse order of the original sentence. Sometimes some expression of long sentences exists a big difference between English and Chinese or even completely opposite. Therefore, we have to make some adjustment to conform to the Chinese language expression way.

Third, the split method

this method is to split a long sentence into many clauses to be translated. Sometimes, the relationship between main clause and subordinate clause is not so close, then we can make the division, describe separately; to make semantic coherence, sometimes words can be increased properly.

Just like an old saying: skill comes from practice. As long as we practice constantly, we will conquer any translation difficulty.