Research On English Translation Of The Border Town From The Perspective Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor

In 1985,Halliday proposed the concept of grammatical metaphor in An Introductio to Functional Grammar,pointing out that metaphor occurs not only at the lexical level but also at the grammatical level.Metaphor that occurs at the level of grammar is called grammatical metaphor.According to Halliday,grammatical metaphor can be divided into ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal metaphor.Later,he further subdivided them into thirteen types.Grammatical metaphor is not a metaphor between concrete things,but a metaphor between functional structures.Halliday(1985)holds a view that a material process can be metaphorized into a mental process or a relational process and a behavioral process can be metaphorized into a material process.He calls a sentence mostly close to realistic life a sentence of congruent form and a metaphorical sentence one of metaphorical form.The Border Town is a masterpiece of Mr.Shen Congwen.The story takes place in Chadong,a border town,in the 1930s.With the love story of Emerald,the customs of the town are depicted and the human beauty is revealed.This work is with highly value of aesthetic art.There are several translated versions of the novel.This thesis selects Yang Hsien-yi and his wife Gladys Yang's translated version as an example to study the characteristics of Chinese translators' rendering of classic literature through case analysis.Mr.and Mrs.Yang's translation is favored by readers because it highlights the aesthetic effect of the language and satisfies the reader's aesthetic requirements.The target reader can enjoy the same aesthetic feeling as the original reader.They can express the characters,movements,thoughts and feelings in the novel through metaphorical translation,and make people's images vivid on the paper.At the same time,Mr.and Mrs.Yang can accurately express the author's attitude.The accuracy and expressive power of metaphorical translation makes this translated version very important in the history of translation of Chinese literary works.Therefore,studying this translation from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor can open up a broader research space for future translation studies,so that Chinese literary works can go out better and faster.The writer starts from two aspects of the realization of ideational grammatical metaphor:metaphor of transitivity and nominalization,and conducts a case analysis of specific ideational grammatical metaphors in the translation of The Border Town.In terms of metaphor of transitivity,this study mainly explores the mutual metaphorization of several types of processes in the English translation of The Border Town,including the transference between the existential process and the material process,between the material process and the relational process,between the relational process and the behavioral process,between the material process and the behavioral process,and the mental process and the material process.In terms of nominalization,this paper mainly discusses the characteristics of regarding process,property and circumstance as things in the process of translation.Through case analysis,both aspects are elaborated.On the basis of the above discussion,from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor,this study summarizes four feasible translation strategies:the first is sentence structural reconstructing,the second is information adding,the third is word class converting,and the fourth is perspective shifting.It is hoped that these four strategies will have a certain guiding effect on Chinese to English translation of literary works,and to give some inspiration to relevant researchers and translators.In summary,in the process of translation,translators can use linguistic theories to guide Chinese to English translation of literary works,and to interpret and re-create language.The theory of grammatical metaphor provides a new perspective for translators.This study still has some areas for improvement.In view of this,it is hoped that in future research,relevant scholars can pay more and more attention to the application of linguistic theories to translation studies,and further expand the depth and breadth of translation studies.