Abstract
The variability and range of the things that the grammars of actual languages regulate make it very hard to say that a grammar is what all languages have in common. The recent assertion by translator and scholar David Bellos of the incommensurability of grammars and the very inadequacy of grammar may seem to give translators a reason not to spend too much time on grammar. This chapter describes that even if neither Chinese grammar nor English grammar is entirely adequate, they apply to the vast majority of the sentences in source and target language texts, and that even if Chinese grammar and English grammar are not entirely commensurable, they have enough in common for contrastive analysis. The most useful studies of the role of grammar in Chinese-English translation draw on functionalist linguistics, and can be discussed in terms of discourse and pragmatics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Routledge handbook of Chinese translation |
| Editors | Chris SHEI, Zhao-Ming GAO |
| Publisher | Taylor and Francis Ltd. |
| Chapter | 8 |
| Pages | 129-146 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781315675725, 9781317383031 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781138938267 |
| Publication status | Published - Oct 2017 |