Report On The Selection Of Subject In C-E Translation From The Perspective Of Halliday’s Theme-rheme Theory

Based on the author’s translation practice of the Annual Report of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics(IET),Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS),this report analyzes the strategies of subject selection in C-E translation from the perspective of Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theory by adopting the methods of comparative analysis and case analysis.The translation materials selected in this paper belong to science and technology field and includes ten parts,totaling 29,945 words in Chinese,and it mainly describes what academic achievements the Institute made in 2012.Since such materials have quite distinct features in their vocabulary,grammar and also writing style,they provide abundant excellent textual cases for the research and analysis of this translation report.Thematic shift plays a critical role in the translation process.A proper thematic shift can not only our translation work more faithful to the source text(ST),but also clearer in information and logic development so as to achieve deep-level equivalence between source text and target text.Grounded on the author’s translation experience,this report finds that Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theory offers useful guidance in this respect,which can be seen from the following two aspects: first,the selection of a proper theme shall not only occupy the first place in formal,but also function as the starting point of a message;second,the real value of the theme is not just restricted to constructing the structure of a single sentence,but also organizing the information flow from sentence to sentence.This report aims to explore the application of the Theme-Rheme theory in translation practice by means of comparative and case analysis.The results show that one of the reasons rendering translators unable to achieve deep-level equivalence in CE translation is that they equal the Chinese topic-comment structure with the English subject-predicate structure,and do not even take into account the different habits of expression and the relevant textual meaning of the two languages.To solve such a problem,this report offers several translation strategies under the guidance of ThemeRheme theory:(a)if the topic-comment structure in Chinese overlaps the subjectpredicate structure in English,translators then can follow the original thematic structure directly by taking the topic in Chinese as the subject in an English sentence;(b)if there is any difference in the thematic structure between these two languages,translators are required to find out the reasons for the above differences and adopt different strategies accordingly.