The Translation Of Boredom From The Perspective Of The Thematic Structure Theory

"Theme" and "rheme" are two important concepts in terms of the discourse function, viewed from the prospective of the systemic functional linguistics. Theme structure displays the information structure of discourse and helps the reader more easily understand the writer’s rhetoric intention, in other words, theme structure plays a key role in guiding the translator to know the information distribution and layout of the original source.The introduction of the paper presents the Thematic Structure Theory’s significance and the current research and development state of the theory at home and abroad. Then the paper describes what the Thematic Structure Theory is:the concept of "theme","rheme","thematic progression" and its four basic patterns. After that the writer figures out three main differences between English and Chinese text: English is a heavy hypotaxis and subject-prominent language while Chinese is a parataxis and topic-prominent language; In Chinese text, the principle applied is usually to follow "front-weight"; While in English text, the rule applied is to follow the principle of "end-weight", and to use a variety of syntax means to release the English sentence’s front-weight. Combined with the writer’s practice from the translation of Boredom, the paper discusses the situation where the translator should choose to keep the original thematic progression and where should rebuild new thematic progression pattern.The conclusion points out that, to obtain a good translation version, generally speaking, the translator should try to maintain the source text’s thematic progression patterns in target text as much as possible. In some cases, however, translator need appropriately change or adjust the original thematic progression pattern in target text and compose a new pattern to have a natural and smooth translation version and achieve the author’s communicative intention.