The Delivery Of Theme Markedness In English-Chinese Poem Translation From Iconicity Perspective

Theme-Rheme structure,first proposed by the Prague school and further developed by Systemic Functional Linguistics,is regarded as an important approach to discourse analysis.Themes,the elements serve as the points of departure of the messages,can be further divided into "Marked Themes" and "Unmarked Themes".It is well recognized that Marked Themes are more meaningful than other Themes as they are the results of motivated choosing.Their "markedness" mainly derives from their special thematic positions in the clause,from their deviation from norms and their complexity in forms,the successful delivery of which is of great importance in translating.As the notion of markedness is closely related to human being ’s perception and cognition,this thesis approaches marked Themes as well as their translation from the perspective of Iconicity Principle which underlies the natural connection between linguistic signs and human being’s cognitive processes.What is more,the proposition held by the Iconicity Principle that there are logical relations between linguistic signs and human cognition offers an answer to the long lasting debate on the primacy of content over form or vice visa in translation studies as well as sheds some light on the translation approaches to realizing "equivalence" between the source texts and the target texts.In this thesis,a framework on marked Theme translation is built based on different iconic relations between marked Themes’ special word ordering and human cognition.Under this framework,marked Themes’markedness values lie in their descriptive value,coherent value and stylistic value.As the realization of markedness value is closely related to the word ordering in clause,the typical word ordering choices of English language and Chinese language should be taken into consideration in translating.In terms of choosing thematic position elements,English is a subject-prominent language while Chinese is a topic-prominent language which is their typo-logical difference.This great discrepancy in choosing initial position elements which poses great challenges to translators who are supposed to convey both the meaning and the form of the source texts are taken into consideration in this thesis.This thesis is driven by a corpus of 95 English-Chinese translations of English majors(sophomores).The original text is an English short poem characterized by frequently appearing marked Theme-Rheme structures.This thesis will depict and analyze how the "extra meaning",namely,the markedness values of the marked Themes are realized in the target texts.The standards of evaluating the translations are based on the Iconicity perspective.After a qualitative study and a quantitative study of the corpus,this thesis finds that there are seven methods to convey the markedness into the target texts.The frequency and distribution of the seven methods of translating in the corpus reflect the typo-logical difference between English language and Chinese language as well as English majors’ knowledge on Theme-Rheme theory and their bilingual competence.This thesis is in an attempt to explore the typological nature of English and Chinese and shed some light on translation teaching practice.