A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis On Reproducing Experiential Meaning In The Translation Of Ancient Chinese Poetry And Prose In Political Texts

Ancient Chinese poetry and prose(ACPP)represent the wisdom of the Chinese nation and the profound Chinese culture developed in the course of its thousand years of history.Quoting ACPP in political speeches and writings is a unique language style for the Chinese President Xi Jinping,as shown in his representative works of Xi Jinping:The Governance of China(hereinafter referred to as Governance).Those citations are conducive to interpret Xi’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and his governance philosophy on issues closely related to China’s development and people’s wellbeing.Since the release of the first two volumes and their English translations,the book series have gained worldwide attention and plenty of compliments from various sides.It is therefore of practical significance to study how the ACPP was effectively translated in Governance volumes to help translators to overcome the difficulty of rendering literary texts in political texts.This research,by drawing on the insights from Halliday’s SFL theory,explored the reproducing of experiential meaning of ACPP in Xi Jinping:The Governance of China,Volumes Ⅰ and Ⅱ.It proposed three research questions:a)What are the transitivity patterns of the translation when it reproduces the experiential meaning of the source text?i.Are there any transitivity shifts in the translations?ii.To what extent was the experiential meaning shifted in the translations?b)What types of transitivity shifts tend to be involved in the translations?c)What are the possible factors that motivate the transitivity shift tendencies?To better answer the research questions,I conducted the empirical research through a case study in this thesis to try to describe the transitivity patterns of the ST and TT,various types of transitivity translation shifts and the possible reasons behind transitivity shift tendencies.It can be found that there are four major transitivity shift trends:a)The tendency of shifts from other process types to material and relational processes;b)The tendency of shifts within material clauses;c)The tendency of the compression rather than expansion of processes;d)The tendency of participant and circumstance nominalization.In general,such findings suggest TT is prone to reproduce the experiential meaning in a way that involves more representations of the flow of events and the creation of relationships among entities,focusing more on construing experience of the physical world rather than personal emotion,feelings or cognition.Besides,the TT is also inclined to simplify certain experiential meaning through compressing and omitting unnecessary processes and the participant and circumstance nominalization.This research found the factors to such tendencies include the features of political texts,language differences,the distribution of process types in ST and TT,the delicacy of transitivity system and register variations.For register variations,statistics indicate the change of fields of activity can also be reasons for the transitivity shift tendencies.With such findings,I hope this thesis can be of certain value on the development of literary translation in non-literary texts with SFL and inspire translators in rendering literary citations in political texts,making contributions to telling China’s stories well and conveying China’s voice effectively around the world.