Sentence Structure

スキルアップ2019/03/26Sentence Structure

春の訪れとともに、東京でも桜が咲き始めました！
いかがお過ごしでしょうか。
当スクールの日英講座の添削は、全てネイティブ講師が担当していますが、今回は、講師のGarry Parzych先生にご執筆いただきました。
日本に住んでいたこともあるGarry先生は、現在アメリカで翻訳家としても活躍しながら、多くの受講生の訳文を添削しています。
今回は、日英翻訳（英訳）を学ぶ受講生に向けてのメッセージです。

Sentence structure is one of the keys to clear sentences and natural language;
unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest differences between Japanese and English
writing. The good news is that sentence structure can be learned through both
serious study and casual reading.

Beginner translators often don’t know where to start when translating a complicated
sentence. I recommend that when you don’t know where to begin, start with the
subject, main verb, and object, then build the sentence by adding the other elements
around this basic skeleton. I use this same technique when I rewrite a long, confusing
series of words with unclear connections; once I identify at least the subject and main
verb, the relationships among elements become clear.

If you translate from Japanese to English word for word, your main verb will usually
appear at the very end of the sentence, which will be unnatural to English readers,
unless the sentence is short. English readers (and listeners) often lose the flow of
ideas when the main idea comes after many words, and in most cases, the main idea
of the sentence is expressed by the main verb. Get in the habit of putting the main idea
relatively early in the sentence.

Studying parts of speech and how they relate to each other – nouns, pronouns, verbs,
adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions – will help you communicate
understandable relations between sentence elements. You have to go to some depth;
for example, you have to be familiar with not only nouns, but the differences between
subjects and objects, and how they relate to their verbs. Although it can be a lot of work
at first, once you’re in the habit of identifying parts of speech and tying them together,
you’ll be able to compose clear, natural expressions.

An excellent place to start your studies is Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
Although some academics argue that this concise, classic book on writing offers some
flawed advice on grammar, it gives an excellent overview of sentence structure and is
very useful for learning how to write clearly and concisely in a non-academic setting.
One popular version gives both the English text and Japanese translations of the important points.

Casual reading is also very helpful, so long as the writing is of good quality. You may
be surprised to learn that newspapers are often poorly written, partially because writers
have very tight deadlines. Reading the same grammatical patterns repeatedly can help
you master them, in a way that merely reading about them can’t. When living in Tokyo
and trying to improve my Spanish (my wife’s native language), I read Selecciones, the
Spanish language version of the popular magazine Reader’s Digest, every day on the
train. Every month offered about 200 pages of articles of all types; I could find articles
that interested me in every issue. Before long, grammatical expressions that I had
struggled with for years became natural for me, after reading them again and again in
context.

Reading in your field can be especially helpful. I specialize in rewriting patent translations,
and have learned “patentese” by reading thousands of patents over the years.

There are many aspects of writing; in my opinion sentence structure is the most basic,
and will improve your writing in many of the other aspects.

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