the-influence-of-the-difference-between-english-and-chinese-thinking-on-translation--英语专业.doc

17

Contents
The Influence of the Difference between English and Chinese Thinking on Translation 1
I. Introduction 1
II. The Thinking Modes of Chinese and English reflected in the Language 3
A. The Relationship of Thinking and Language 3
B. The Classification of Chinese and English Thinking Modes 5
1. The Synthetic Thinking Mode vs. the Analytic Thinking Mode 7
2. The Curvilinear Thinking Mode vs. the Linear Thinking Mode 7
3. The Image Thinking Mode vs. the Abstract Thinking Mode 8
4. The Ontological Thinking Mode vs. the Objective Thinking Mode 9
III. The Transfer of Thought Patterns in the Course of Translation 11
A. Transferring between Concreteness and Abstractness 11
B. Rearrangement of Word Order 11
C. Transferring between Covert Coherence and Overt Cohesion 13
D. Rearrangement of Sentence Structure 14
E. Transferring between the Subjective and the Objective 15
IV. Conclusion 17
Bibliography 18
Acknowledgements 19

The Influence of the Difference between English and Chinese Thinking on Translation
I. Introduction
Nowadays, more and more Chinese People be come to realize that it is a very urgent task to learn English well so as to meet the needs and challenges of the society. Under this circumstance of "English Frenzy", a series of problems correspondently arise like mushrooms. How to improve the qualities of English teaching and learning in China nation widely? How to overcome and avoid misunderstandings in communication? How to enhance the overall level of E-C & C-E translation etc. Concerned with these problems, scholars, in the field of foreign language teaching and the field of translation, have made new approaches to the principles and methods to actuate their work, e.g. 1994 witnessed a new discipline upon the scene when China Association for Comparative Study of English and Chinese (CACSEC) was established with the initiation made by Zhang Zhiying and other scholars(Zhang Zhiying,2000).
However, a thorough study on the relationship between language and thought has been marginalized for long. In many books, dictionaries or monographs that specialized on language studies, this aspect is only a slight touch. As what the American scholar Marsh (2008) once noted in his book, American English Rhetoric, "Even though English thought patterns are not native to you, once you understand them you can more easily imitate them. By doing so, you will succeed in writing more effective English." So, to write this paper means the author take the challenge to follow those preceding footsteps and make new accomplishment, for there have been earlier introductions to the topic from which I myself have benefited.
Language, the most commonly accepted, is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. And thought, philosophically speaking, is a process of our human mind to reflect the objective reality. In terms of the relationship between language and thought, there are mainly two groups of views: the first is that language determines thought and the second is that thought determines language. So the whole we are concerned with in this paper is whether our thoughts are formed in advance of the words that we utter or whether our ideas are formed in advance of the words that we utter or whether our ideas are formed in terms of the words themselves. This paper firstly takes a deep insight into the root of the dialectical relation between language and thought(Gong Aihua,2004). And then, Chinese and English thought pattern differences are listed in mainly three aspects, namely, image thought vs abstract thought, synthetic thought vs. analytic thought, and subjective thought vs. objective thought.
In addition, it has for centuries been taken for granted that translation merely takes place between languages(Gen Hongmin,2005). However, as proved by practice, translation cannot be viewed as a merely linguistic undertaking, but should be regarded as an aspect of a larger domain, namely, that of communication. In the case of complex texts, translation involves not only "linguistic proficiency" but also "encyclopedic knowledge"(Ma Jiguang,1999). It always involves a process full of contradictions. Being an important aspect of "inter-cultural communication", translation has an important role to play in our epoch. Based on the relation between language and thought pattern, this paper explores the connection of translation with other disciplines, e.g. sociolinguistics& translation, contrastive linguistics& translation, and pragmatics& translation. Some skills or techniques on how to do E-C translation well are also highlighted in this paper, from which we can draw something beneficial to the enhancement of E-C translation (Zhu Shanjun,2005).
Starting from the discussion of the dialectical relation between thought and language, this paper provides detailed coverage of Chinese and English thought pattern differences, their reflections on the two languages and text structure, and offers some techniques on how to do E--C translation well.
II. The Thinking Modes of Chinese and English reflected in the Language
A. The Relationship of Thinking and Language
Human beings repeatedly recognize and understand the objective things during their practice in nature, and then form ideas in their brains, with which they use to judge and deduce things. That is the formation process of human thinking.
Thinking is a difficult term to define because of its abstract traits. Here are the definitions of thinking from some commanded dictionaries. On the page 2377 of Webster's Third New International Dictionary and page 650 of Britannica, thinking is taken as the action of producing thoughts, or a means of getting something in the objective world. In Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, thinking is defined as "an act that uses one's mind or the power of reason to make judgments, to form opinions." The definitions mentioned above show that thinking couldn't be separated from the human brain. In Concise Social Scientance Dictionary, thinking is viewed as "the indirect, general reflection of objective substance, which is based on the social practice" (Kaplan,1996). Now here is one of the definitions from the translation works. Fang Mengzhi takes it that way: "Thinking is a cognitive process to make analysis, synthesis, judgment, inference etc. on the basis of figurativeness and concept. The study of brain shows that thinking is the synthesis of the physical, chemical and physiological motional forms in the neurological centre of human brain. It is a kind of complicated form of the motion of matter" (Nida.2001). These tend to show that thinking is generally called the cognitive activity compared with existence, such as consciousness and spirits. People can only accumulate a wealth of perceptual materials by repeated social practice, and then start the essential work of analysis and synthesis. They get the knowledge of the essence and development laws of things through this way, and it can be applied to influence the objective world. Thinking has different forms such as logical thinking and image thinking etc. In short, thinking is an abstract thing that can impose its impact on the objective world(Ma Lanfang,2004).
In a word, thinking reflects the objective reality of human brain. It is also the process of the human brain to receive, process, store and output information guiding the human behavior.
Although thinking is a common ability of all human beings, each nation has its typical ways of thinking. However, they can use the different thinking ways to express the same ideas and to get the same knowledge, and the only differences may be the different words, sentence orders or text structures in the different language expressions. So the scientific study of language is also necessary.
There are many definitions of language in different fields and even in translatology. Here is a typical one that associates with thinking to some degree.
Human language is a structured system for combining words that makes it possible for us to communicate with others, to think about our immediate environment, or to imagine(Sui Rongyi,2006). Language is not just speaking; language and speech are not the same thing. Speech is the oral production of language. Language is more abstract and multimodal; it can be manifested through signs, symbols, finger spelling, written words and Braille. We can further define language by looking at its properties (Samovar, 2000).
It can be concluded from the above that most scholars support that language and thinking interact and interweave with each other and thinking plays a main role in the relationship. Thinking is abstract, and it must take language as its medium to express the objective world. It is the process that human brain reflects the objective world. Reality is the basis of thinking, and it is also the object of thinking reflection. Thinking takes language as its medium to reflect reality. Language is the demonstration of thinking and helps thinking to form or show the ideas or thought in the deep brain. So thinking to some extent determines the language or influences the language expression. Human thinking activities are expressed by the forms of words, phrases, sentences and texts etc, So thinking is a recognizing activity of the human brain to reflect the outside things, but language is the tool to communicate their thinking.
B. The Classification of Chinese and English Thinking Modes
Language is the most important communication tool for human beings, it is the outer shell of thinking and used to reflect and express the thoughts and ideas produced by thinking. In the long history of human development, people gradually cultivate the habits of understanding of the objective world, which with the help of language form the thoughts. The thoughts are summed up in patterns; and at last the thinking styles come into being. Different nation has different cultures and different thinking styles, patterns and thinking traits. These together form the thinking modes. Thinking modes not only influence the living styles of human beings but also the ways to do or think and express things. In this part the classification of the English and Chinese thinking modes will be discussed in order to give a clearer and more concrete understanding of their differences. Before the commencement of the study about the classification of the thinking modes, it should be made clear what thinking mode is.
As it referred to above that the different cultures, geography and living habits together form the thinking mode, which is a steady thinking pattern. "The thinking modes are thinking models that embody certain thinking contents and certain thinking methods and apply to certain field" (Vermeer,1987). That is to say the thinking mode is a kind of thinking model, which not only is formed from the reality, but also guides the reality. It becomes a model for human beings to follow unconsciously. "Different thinking modes directly restrict the choice, perfection, and adjustment of words and the arrangement of sentence order etc, the code process of language is the thinking process in the thinking modes which is formed by human beings in the long practice. Every thinking mode is historical, social and national. It is expressed in personal thinking activities that are the accumulation of the social history experiences.
So here come the following four pairs of thinking modes classified on the principle of realistic application in translation: the synthetic thinking mode vs. the analytic thinking mode; the curvilinear thinking mode vs. the linear thinking mode; the image thinking mode vs. the abstract thinking mode and the ontological thinking mode vs. the objective thinking mode.
1. The Synthetic Thinking Mode vs. the Analytic Thinking Mode
In philosophy, Chinese people emphasize the ideas of "unity of heaven and man", the blending of objects and man", "harmony", and "the power of understanding". Chinese people don't stress the analysis, but pay attention to "the individual comprehension", "understand tacitly" and "the mentality space and time order". (GaoChunjuan.2005) However, the westerners think man and objects should be separated from each other and emphasize the form coherence and logical deduction due to their philosophy. As the famous translator Fu Lei once mentioned that there were basic differences between eastern and western thinking modes. He holds that the Easterners pay attention to synthesis, conclusion, hint and reservation, while the Westerners focus on analysis, the pursuit of details, and the all-aspects description of things. This kind of thinking difference is on the philosophical basis, so it is the most common and complex one of the collisions. The difference can be seen in the following three aspects: The Holistic Thinking Mode vs. the Individual Thinking Mode; the Dialectical-focus Thinking Mode vs. Formal Logical-focus Thinking Mode; The Angles of Understanding the World
2. The Curvilinear Thinking Mode vs. the Linear Thinking Mode
The western philosophy thinks that if two things are different from each other, they are against and different from each other, which means the westerners focus on the differences of two things rather than the similarities. So the westerners apply the true or false deducing modes to think about things and matters. That is to say they think about things in linear ways. It is the Chinese tradition to pursue the unity and harmony of the world, so they don't distinguish two opponents clearly, because they think there are no absolutely and totally different things in the world. So the Chinese people have formed the curvilinear or spiral thinking mode. When the English people want to express an idea, they will directly put the topic sentence in the front or at the beginning of a paragraph. As to the Chinese people, they prefer to explain or describe an idea from the peripheries and the outside atmosphere to support the main idea or topic shown up at the end of the expression. The English from generalization to natives are used to applying the topic shown up at the end of the modes from general to concrete, illustration, from the whole to individual in sentence structuring, and these are the expressions of their linear thinking paragraph and mode.
3. The Image Thinking Mode vs. the Abstract Thinking Mode
In Chinese culture, people are particular about images and form the thinking mode of this kind. They are used to using the image to express the abstract notion, in that way the abstract notion can be more vivid and easy to understand. However, in western culture, people pay attention to the abstract thinking mode because they have the cultural tradition of esteeming the power of thinking. They prefer using the abstract notion to express the concrete objects, which means to get t