A Contrastive Study Of The Transitivity In Luotuo Xiangzi And Its English Translation

Ever since its birth, many scholars at home and abroad have been engaging in theresearch on the novel Luotuo Xiangzi and its various translations from differentperspectives. But the present thesis will take the original novel and its Englishtranslation Rickshaw Boy as its research object, employ the transitivity system ofHalliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics as its theoretical framework, and adopt acontrastive approach, attaching much importance to analyzing the similarities anddifferences of the transitivity in distribution as well as its influence to probe how theauthor unfolds the theme and the image of the protagonist through the choices ofdifferent transitivity processes. Moreover, it aims to make a functional analysis of thesame novel of two different languages, and then point out some problems that otherscholars may not notice, hoping to bring some valuable contributions to thefunctional-contrastive research of Chinese-English novels, especially for the Englishversion of Luotuo Xiangzi, and to help readers better understand its language andtheme of the novel and its English translation.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the thesis will conduct acontrastive analysis of the transitivity in Luotuo Xiangzi and its English translationRickshaw Boy. The whole novel can be divided into four parts according to the plot ofdevelopment—“three-time ups and downs” that the protagonist experiences in all hislife. They are the beginning part, developing part, the climax part and the ending part.Then sampling method is adopted to make a contrastive analysis of transitivity, andmake a further analysis of two main processes in detail.Through the present contrastive study, we can find that there are similarities anddifferences in Luotuo Xiangzi and its English translation Rickshaw Boy. The factorsfor such results are the similarities and differences between Chinese and English, thegenre and theme of the text, writing backgrounds and so on. Meanwhile, the thesisalso proves the effectiveness and practicability of Halliday’s Systemic FunctionalLinguistics in Chinese discourses based on the authentic statistics, and provides us anew angle and theoretical basis for analyzing literature works.