For clauses, relative importance governs not only their placement but their form. As you know from studying English, if two ideas are of equal importance, they will be expressed as coordinate clauses, whereas if one is more important than the other, they will be cast as a main (or independent) clause and a subordinate (or dependent) clause.

Coordinate clauses will be joined by a conjunction like “and”, “but”, “or”, “so”, etc. A subordinate clause, which cannot stand alone, will be linked to the main clause by some connecting word like “which”, “when”, “although”, “because”, “if”, “after”, “until”, etc., plainly indicating its dependent nature.

Chinese tends to juxtapose phrases and clauses without any connecting words to indicate the relations between. As Professor Cheng Zhenqiu has pointed out: “the various part of a Chinese sentence often appear to be coordinate with one another without any grammatical indication of their relative importance”. As a consequence, he warns translators against following the Chinese mechanically and treating every phrase or clause as if they all had equal weight.