Abstract:

Based on the corpus statistics, this paper makes a comparative study of the syntax and discourse of Chinese paratactic sentences in human English translation and machine translation, and it finds that between human translation and machine translation there exist significant differences in the choice of clause subject, verb types, sentence categories, link words and the change of the word order in the target language. The proportion of English clauses, non-restrictive verbs and subjective link words in human translation is significantly higher than that in machine translation, while compared with human translation, machine translation has less adjustments or changes in the subject and word order of the original text. These characteristics suggest that machine translations still needs to narrow the gap with human translations in terms of the variety of verb types, the diversity and complexity of syntactic structures and the richness of link patterns in the text, so as to enhance the vividness, authenticity and literariness of literary language.