Indeterminacy, multivalence and disjointed translation

One of the most prominent linguistic features of classical Chinese poetry is syntactic indeterminacy, which brings about multivalence, i.e. multiplicity of connotation, and poses a great problem as well as daunting challenge to Chinese-English translators, for English is basically a language with syntactic determinacy. This paper examines two aspects of indeterminacy involved in classical Chinese poetry, arguing that ‘disjointed translation’ is probably the most inspiring way to cope with Chinese syntactic indeterminacy.