I have been trying to help a translator friend of mine with quite a hefty (30,000 words), very technical document, that concerns itself with market analysis and trading laws.
The translation is going from English to Chinese, but what is causing the problems is not the technical aspect but the style; huge great sentences of between fifty and seventy words, some are longer. Is this just bad copy, or is this a common feature of such documents?
I have had the same problem often enough with Chinese-English translation. Generally I would just put it down to bad writing in the original. Trying to translate bad writing into anything better is damned hard. Just realise you don’t have to translate a long sentence into a long sentence. You usually serve the reader better by chopping it up. I do this a lot translating advertising copy. Advertising uses short, sharp sentences to punch the point home. And you can start sentences with and. Or if. Or in. If you want. In advertising. 
[quote=“olison”]I have been trying to help a translator friend of mine with quite a hefty (30,000 words), very technical document, that concerns itself with market analysis and trading laws.
The translation is going from English to Chinese, but what is causing the problems is not the technical aspect but the style; huge great sentences of between fifty and seventy words, some are longer. Is this just bad copy, or is this a common feature of such documents?[/quote]
Treatises concerning law and legal issues, particularly those related to market analysis or trading laws, could quite conceivably be riddled with the sort of lengthy sentences you describe, to wit, sentences that could stand on their own as worthy paragraphs were they dignified with an indentation of their own, especially since such pieces of writing deal with, in the main, complex issues which entail numerous subpoints and explanations, many of which require their own clauses, and because the method of remuneration for the authors of such documents is quite frequently based on the quantity of prose and/or the clock-hours spent compiling same.
If this translator is asking whether these documents are frequently this way, the alarm bells in my head are going off saying this is an inexperienced translator or one who has no experience in this field. I doubt very much it’s only the style of the document…