I read here:
English emphasizes the structure of sentences, while Chinese focuses on the meaning.
In English, it is very common to see one long sentence with long modifiers including pronouns like “we”, “she”, “they” in addition to “that” and “which”, to avoid recurrences. The sentence may be long and complicated, but it is still clear enough to understand. In Chinese, the situation is very different, where a long sentence in Chinese would be very complicated and extremely difficult to understand. Therefore, in Chinese, we can only find short sentences or long sentences divided into short phrases separated by commas.
I'm not sure why a long sentence in Chinese would be hard to understand, and why short sentences are preferred.
What is an example sentence in English, which is long, and how you would say that in Chinese? Could you provide the pinyin and literal gloss in addition to the Chinese characters, so I could better understand the structure of the Chinese sentence and how it conveys the meaning in few words rather than long sentences?
If you are having difficulty coming up with an example long English sentence to translate, there are these, such as this one (96 words):
As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirrors across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.
How would you (literal gloss) break this sentence into fragments, for translating into Chinese? Maybe it would be helpful to see how the English short-fragment sentence version would look, then how that relates to the Chinese translation.
I'm wondering how Chinese typically conveys meaning using only short sentences, since I come from English and am used to relatively long sentences and don't see how it's possible really yet.