A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Tess Of The D’ Urbervilles From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Theory

Thematic theory is an important theory in linguistic field after Halliday developed the information structure of theme and rheme.Since it was introduced into China in the 1980 s,a lot of domestic scholars have applied it in the study of Chinese and English-Chinese translation.However,the previous studies on the application of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns in E-C translation focus on political reports,speeches,news reports,technical articles,business contracts,and other genres which are more logical and have clear thematic progression patterns.Thematic theory and thematic progression patterns are seldom used for analysis of literary genres such as novels in which thematic progression patterns are uneasy to identify.Based on Halliday’s thematic theory and Xu Shenghuan’s four thematic progression patterns,this thesis takes Thomas Hardy’s classic Tess of the D’ Urbervilles and its two most representative Chinese versions translated respectively by Zhang Guruo and Sun Fali for analysis.Specifically,the author makes a comparative analysis of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns of the samples extracted from three typical discourses of two Chinese versions,aiming to explore how to deal with thematic structure and thematic progression of the original in the process of translation so as to realize a cohesive and coherent translated text.It is observed that although Sun and Zhang tend to adopt different ways of processing thematic progression of the original,they both adopt those that can contribute to textual cohesion and coherence.It can be observed that the two translators adopt two ways of processing thematic progression of the original: first,to retain thematic progression patterns of the original during the process of translation so as to realize the equivalence at the levels both content and form;second,if thematic progression patterns of the original can not be retained,translators deeply understand the meaning of the discourse and then properly adjust thematic progression patterns according to the features of the target language so as to realize textual cohesion and semantic coherence of the target text.Therefore,it is significant for translators to pay attention to thematic structure and thematic progression patterns of the original,especially in literary texts,and adopt proper ways to deal with thematic progression of the original to achieve textual cohesion and coherence of the target text.