Lesson 5 增减词法基础.ppt

III. Omission in English-Chinese Translation Omission, just as amplification, is one of the useful techniques used in translation. By omission, we don’t mean “cutting the feet to fit the shoes”, instead, we try to make our translation more expressive and explicit. Liu Xie, a famous ancient Chinese literary critic, pointed out “善删者字去而意留, 善敷者辞殊而意显”. That is to say, omission is supposed to be done just to the point, to convey the essence of the original more effectively. For example: “Judges are supposed to treat every person equal before the law.” Suppose we put the sentence into “法律面前，人人平等”， “judges” and “are supposed to” are omitted in the translation, and then the original meaning is thus misrepresented. 1. Omitting the Pronoun Pronouns are more frequently used in English then in Chinese. Therefore, when translated into Chinese, many English pronouns may be omitted so as to conform the rendering to the accustomed usage of Chinese expression. e.g. 1) He put his hands into his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. 他将双手放进衣袋，然后耸了耸肩。 2) For two weeks, he had been studying the house, looking at its rooms, its electric wring, its path and its garden. 两周以来，他一直注意观察房子的情况，查看各个房间，留心电线的走向、通道和花园的布局。 Sometimes even the subject can be omitted. For example: “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage.” 我以前动手写小说从未象现在感到惶惑过。我叫它作小说，只是因为除了小说之外，想不出能称它作什么。故事几乎没有可述的，结局既不是死，也不是结婚。 Lesson Five（第五课） 增/减词法Amplification and Omission I. Amplification in English-Chinese Translation A good translation, generally speaking, is a bit longer than the original (we don’t mean that a good translation must be longer than the original) primarily because translators must faithfully turn the obvious form of the original language into target language, and at the same time, must convey what implied in the original context, especially that