從比較語法的觀點來分析解說英譯中困難之所在

Difficulties in English-Chinese Translation: An Analysis from the Perspective of Contrastive Grammar

黃春騰(Chuen-Teng Huang)

《SPECTRUM ： NCUE Studies in Language, Literature, Translation》 1期 (2006/07) Pp. 139-159

https://doi.org/10.29601/YYWYLL.200607.0011

摘要

語言學界認爲中文是一種主旨語突顯(Topic-prominent)及具有篇章取向(Discourse-oriented)之語言；而英文則爲一種主詞突顯(Subject-prominent)及具有句子取向(Sentence-oriented)的語言。此兩種語言在語法上之明顯差異形成在翻譯時之特定的一些困難。本文以Li & Thompson(1976, 1982)的主旨鍊觀念和衍生語法(Generative Linguistics)之理論爲基礎架構，舉一些常見的中英文句子爲例，對其進行比對、分析、並說明其在語法方面的這些重大差異。旨在探討在英譯中時，因這些差異所可能產生的特定困難之所在，以及造成困難之原因。期待透過這些分析與了解而能夠在翻譯時，能更精確的掌握原文之語意，減少誤譯之可能，進而能以恰當的中文表達出來。文中指出人類大腦工作記憶之限制、中文之篇章結構取向、以及其語序之左分支等現象是造成中文常需要將其語句主旨語化之主要原因。本文也分別舉例分析說明，這兩種語言的其他重要差異與造成翻譯困難之原因。

關鍵字

比較語法 ； 英譯中 ； 翻譯困難 ； 中文語法特色

並列摘要

Chinese is known as a topic-prominent or discourse-oriented language compared with English, which is subject-prominent and sentence-oriented. Clusters of grammatical differences can be found between these two types of languages. For example, Chinese is a left-branching language while English is a right-branching language. In addition, such phenomena as the frequent use of the topicalized construction, the pro-drop phenomenon, the lack of tense-aspect marking on the verb of a tensed clause, the lack of relative and expletive pronouns, and the non-occurrence of move-α from the d-structure to the s-structure, etc. in Chinese, were demonstrated to show the direct contrast to the non-occurrence of such phenomena in the English language. Based on Li and Thompson's (1982) analysis of Chinese and the framework of Generative Linguistics, the purpose of this paper was aimed at identifying and analyzing these types of structures in Chinese against their equivalents in English, and at finding out and explaining in each case what causes the difficulty that occurs in the process of the English-Chinese translation. It is hoped that some difficulty in translation may be reduced due to these analyses and explanations. One of the major findings in this paper is that the limited capacity of our working memory, the left-branching nature of the Chinese NP (i.e. arguments) and VP (i.e. predicate) modifiers in a clause, and the discourse orientation are responsible for the frequent use of the topicalized construction in Chinese. Other differences between the two languages and difficulties in translation were also illustrated and explained with examples in this paper.