【正文】 such plex sentences with embedded clauses are still a mon thing On the contrary a long sentence with embedded clauses is nowhere to be found in Chinese 22 Features of long English sentences Firstly there are more phrases In the long sentences there are prepositional phrases adjective phrases infinitive phrases gerund phrase or participial phrase sometimes some word in the phrase is decorated by other phrases thus forms a multicolor structure in which a phrase contains other phrases Secondly there are more coordinate ingredients Adding coordinate subject predicate object attribute and adverbial modifiers these pound ingredients such as the subject the object are sometimes narrated by the decorating words and expressions or the subordinate clauses which lengthen the sentence and make it more difficult Thirdly there are more additive ingredients There are parenthetical remarks appositive remarks or the independent ponents superadded other ingredients thus the punctuation marks especially the ma increases it is mon that there are five or more mas in a sentence Fourthly there are more pound sentences It is an effective way to expand a sentence by increasing pound sentences Fifthly there are more subordinate clauses It is an important method to expand a sentence by increasing subordinate clauses Sometimes we expand some certain subordinate clauses to pose a long sentence Sometimes even the pound sentence and the host subordinate clause interlock in the same place or a subordinate clause includes another subordinate clause thus posing a multicolor subordinate clause 23 The position of modifiers There are always many modifiers in the essential ponent of a long English sentence for example the noun that serves as a subject or an object often has one or some adjectives prepositional phrases participial phases as well as the attributive clauses which modify and limit this noun Another example is a verb that serves as a predicate often has one or several adverbs participial phases prepositional phrases as well as adverbial subordinate clauses which decorate this verb When translating a lengthy sentence with a plex structure we have to differentiate the essential ponent and the modifier first and we can mark the essential ponents and the modifiers in the original English sentence in order to make the structure of the sentence clearer at a glance and reanizes the main information of this sentence in the brains Obviously modifier is a key point in the process of translation next we discuss the position of modifiers Word order in English is more flexible than in Chinese In English as long as the article concord is realized the word order bees relatively flexible However since the Chinese language does not require this sort of grammatical concord the word order tends to be more fixed The position of modifiers reflects the flexibility of word order in both languages In English modifiers can be put before or after the headword and there are no limits to the length or the number of modifiers one headword can be loaded with In Chinese attributive modifiers are mostly put before rather than after the headword and one sentence can only be loaded with a certain number of modifiers English is principally rightbranching as opposed to Chinese which is principally leftbranching English sentences are marked by their closed beginnings and open endings On the contrary the beginnings of Chinese sentences are open to syntactic elements while their endings are closed The convention of open beginning in Chinese encourages the occurrence of premodification For example if the basic sentence is 那個(gè)人是王芳 and it can be expanded in the direction from right to left in this way 和小明說(shuō)話的那個(gè)人是王芳 站在那邊和小明說(shuō)話的那個(gè)人是王芳 你看到的站在那邊和小明說(shuō)話的那個(gè)人是王芳 今天你看到的站在那邊和小明說(shuō)話的那個(gè)人是王芳 On the contrary English sentences usually branch at the end of its main clause Open ending encourages the positioning of modifiers after the modified and thus the sentence expansion model shows a rightbranching tendency Chapter 3 Linguistic transfer of long English sentences 31 The differences between English and Chinese According to the language family English belongs to the language of Pinyin while Chinese belongs to the language of glyph Next we talk about the differences between English and Chinese Firstly English emphasizes structure while Chinese stresses semantics In the translation work from English to Chinese we can see that long English sentence is always plex because through the arrangement of the structure we can express extensive meaning in a sentence First we have to see several examples 1 It applies equally to traditional historians who view history as only the external and internal criticism of sources and to social science historians who equate their activity with specific techniques This sentence which has as many as thirty words is a typical plex sentence Saying from the content it mainly provides the information from two aspects one is It applies to historians the other is the concrete details of historians Saying from the structure it is a principal clause with two subordinate clauses guided by whom Although the structure is plex and the information content is large this speech in English is certainly not disanized because the sentence structure is linked together and the semantics is clear the attribute clause guided by who is put behind the noun to modify this noun and this expression form is monly used in English that is the semantics of the two subordinate clauses is both relatively independent and is also united together as one body with the principal clause If this sentence is altered to a sentence like 2 It applies equally to traditional historians and to social science historians Traditional historians or the former view history as on