Thematic Transference In Modern Chinese Prose Translation: A Functional Perspective

This thesis, based on Halliday's thematic theory, attempts to uncover the percentage and types of thematic transference as well as its underlying cultural reasons governing thematic transference in modern Chinese prose translation, thus increasing the translator's awareness of intercultural communication and improving the quality of translations.First of all, the thesis reviews thematic theory, in particular Halliday's notion and classification of Theme. After making familiar with all these basic definitions, the author illustrates the reason for adopting Theme-Rheme analysis and the relationship between Theme and Topic, from which we make it clear that Theme-Rheme analysis can be useful in explaining methods of organization and development in different types of text(Baker, 2000: 125-126) and therefore it is a better approach to the language analysis than traditional grammar(Fang Yan, 1993:76).By applying Halliday's framework, the thesis continues to discuss the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in terms of the syntactic constituents in Theme position and the coincidence between Theme and Subject. The analysis is carried out according to the data collected! from A Retrospective of Chinese Literature — Modern Chinese Prose they Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press & Chinese Literature Press and Selected Modern Chinese Prose Writings by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. The conclusion is that the syntactic constituents of Theme in both English and Chinese declarative clauses may be a nominal group, an adverbial group, or a prepositional group, but in Chinese one has a greater freedom in selecting what constituents to be the Theme than in English, since the verb phrase, the adjective phrase and the post-position can normally realize the Theme. This conclusion suggests that, on the one hand, it is possible for one to preserve the original thematic structure to achieve thematic equivalence in translation. On the other hand, one should make full use of the different features of English and Chinese in thematic choice and avoid blindly copying the original thematic structure in translation.Based on the contrastive analysis of the data from some typical Chinese prose, the thesis makes a series of conclusions: firstly, thematic changes do exist in modern Chinese prosetranslation, but the rate is low; Secondly, personal themes play a predominant role in the development of both Chinese text and its rendering. Thirdly, the frequency of the coincidence between Theme and Subject in Chinese is lower than that in English due to the topic prominence and the broad use of zero Subject in Chinese. Fourthly, the translations in question involve several different types of thematic transference: the prepositional theme, the nominal theme, the personal theme and the verbal theme in Chinese sentences can all be transferred into the impersonal pronoun "it" or "there" in English translation. And Chinese verb theme can be transferred into "it" realizing theme, personal theme and gerund realizing theme respectively. Superficially, thematic transferences are merely structural adjustments. However, in essence, it is the underlying cultural differences that greatly affect thematic transference, these differences lie in different thinking modes. The Chinese language tends to stress synthetic thinking, subjective thinking, intuitive thinking and curvilinear thinking, while the English language prefers analytic thinking, objective thinking, rational thinking and linear thinking. Only by realizing these differences can one transfer Themes in a natural and idiomatic way.