In the English translation of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem by Ken Liu there is the sentence in chapter sixteen, The Three Body Problem, that reads:
The longer I worked, the worse my career.
Which to me feels like an incomplete sentence: the worse my career [__ what? __]? Perhaps it could be helped with a became -or- a got? I went back to look at the original sentence which just says:
越混越次
It's an acceptable translation, but sounds very chinglish-y.
Is this a proper sentence?
The longer I worked, the worse my career is an example of what is usually called a double comparative. Such comparatives most commonly contain parallel structures, either with or without verbs. For example in clichés such as:
The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
The sooner, the better.
In your example there is faulty parallelism: a verb is missing in the second part. While its meaning is clear, it is grammatically questionable.
There is a good article about double comparatives on ThoughtCo:
The sentence needs a predicate, depending on the context: The longer I worked, the worse my career was. Or: The longer I worked, the worse my career has been.
