I’m not sure if it’s just the way the language works, or laziness, but I really get frustrated with the lack of punctuation in Chinese. Maybe it is a holdover from classical times when they just didn’t bother with it, but in some cases I think punctuation in modern Chinese has next to no use. I’ll get a paragraph that reads:

A,B,C,D,E,F.

Where each letter is basically its own little sentence. If I translated this into one giant English sentence, people would think I was nuts. A lot of times I will unconsciously break it down and turn it into:

A and B. C and D. E and F.

Then when I go to proofread it looks stupid. This gives me the right sentence length, but it reads like it was written by a fourth grader. If I do:

A. B. C. D. E. F.

People will still think I’m nuts. So I end up having to add little logical connectors to make the paragraph read somewhat naturally. This is basically what you do when translating classical Chinese, so is there really any difference?

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