A Contrastive Study On Experiential Meaning Of Conversations In Jane Eyre

Since Jane Eyre was finished, numerous researches and discussions have been made about it by scholars both at home and abroad. This thesis aims to study the conversations between Jane and Rochester from the perspective of the experiential meaning in the systematic functional grammar. Through the comparative study, the distribution and influence of transitivity and voice between the source language and the target language are described and the discussion is given in order to show how the writer uses the experiential function to reflect the theme of the novel and the mental world of the characters. This thesis also roughly introduces Catford’s translation shifts, through three of which the author tries to explain the reasons why there are some differences in the experiential meaning between the two languages from a new angle.Through the comparative study in the two languages of Jane Eyre, there are both similarities and differences in the selection of experiential function. The similarities are, in both the two languages, the material, the mental and the relational processes all take the higher proportion;the behavioral, the verbal and the existent processes all hold the lower proportion. The proportion that the same process holds in the two languages does not change too much. The differences are mainly caused by two aspects, process shifts and translation shifts, reflecting in the four aspects: (1) English tends to choose static verbs, while dynamic verbs are preferred in Chinese. (2) The frequency of the use of the passive voice in English exceeds that in Chinese. (3) The form of the predicate is a little different in the two languages: the predicate in English must be a verb; while in Chinese, it can be a noun, adjective and noun phrase, etc. (4) The selection of some translation shifts can also cause the differences of the experiential function. It can be discovered from the comparative study, if the translation work wants to satisfy the readers of the target language to a great extent, this kind of differences is inevitable. Through the study, the author hopes to provide a new angle for the appreciation of Jane Eyre.