Most of the domestic researches have studied Chinese-English translation strategies within the framework of western theories, however, in recent years, research on the essential characteristics of Chinese has achieved fruitful accomplishments. This paper, uninfluenced by Indo-European language family and western theories, compares Yu Hua’s realistic novel Chronicle of Blood Merchant with its English translation by Andrew Jones, categorizes the original text and its translation according to the definition and characteristics of different topic chains, one of the essential characteristics of Chinese. The paper explores relative untranslatability of the four topic chains at the linguistic level and the macro translation strategies. It is found that the typical topic chains can be dealt with by comment-division translation strategy, that the nested topic chains can be rendered by topic-division strategy and the embedded topic chains by subtopic-division strategy. As for the complex topic chains which are flexible and changeable with the obvious and abundant zero anaphora can be coped with by topic-manifested-division strategy.