A Study On The Translation Strategy Of Ba Jin’s Translation Of “The Fisherman And His Soul” From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Halliday’s systemic functional grammar theory is considered as one of the most influential linguistic theories in the twentieth century.Since its establishment,the theory of systemic functional grammar has developed rapidly and been applied in many research fields.The transitivity system is the main manifestation of ideological meta-function in systemic functional grammar.Since the 1970 s,many scholars have conducted a plenty of researches under the framework of transitivity system.However,these researches are mostly focused on the themes,characters,genres and symbolic meanings of novels.Transitivity theory has not been paid much attention to in the field of translation studies.The thesis selects the fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Soul” by British aestheticist writer Oscar Wilde as the research object,and aims to conduct comparative research on Ba Jin’s translation text and the original text of “The Fisherman and His Soul” in the perspective of transitivity system.The thesis extracts the clauses with transitivity process transfers in the source and target texts of “The Fisherman and His Soul” through corpus-based research approach,explores the transfer conditions of transitivity process on the basis of the statistical data and analytical results of corpus,and discusses Ba Jin’s translation strategy in transitivity process transfers,hoping to provide reference for future translation researches.The authoress builds a bilingual parallel corpus through the segmentation and alignment on the source text and target text of “The Fisherman and His Soul”.The corpus contains2,010 sets of clauses,with a total of 22,377 Chinese characters and 14,094 English words.Then,the authoress makes clause-by-clause comparisons between the original text and the translation text,and gives the distribution of the six processes of the clauses in both Chinese and English texts,as well as the statistics of the clauses with process transfers.According to the statistics,the proportion of material clauses is the highest in the original text and translation of “Fisherman and the Soul”,followed by relational clauses,verbal clauses,behavioral clauses,existential clauses and mental clauses;additionally,there are a total of122 English clauses with transitivity process transfers.In the 122 clauses,the proportion of English relational clauses is as high as 54%,which is followed by English material clauses(26.2%),and the sum of the other four process clause with process transfers is less than 20%.First,from above data,the authoress analyzes the reasons for the increase and decrease in the numbers of clauses in Ba Jin’s translation and the proportion of the clauses with process transfers.The study finds that long English post-modifiers are usually segmented as independent clauses to avoid redundant expressions in Chinese;English short attributive clauses or adverbial clauses are often translated into Chinese attributive or adverbial phrases so as to conform to Chinese language conventions.Additionally,the complexity of English relational process and the flexible expressions of meanings in material clauses result in the high conversion rate of relational and material processes among the six types of processes.Second,according to above statistics of the clauses with process transfers,the authoress explores the conditions of the conversion from English relational and material clauses to other Chinese clauses.The study finds that if the relational clause describes the positional relationship between two entities,it will be converted into existence clause;if relational or material clauses emphasizes a certain action,they will be converted into material clauses;if the relational or material clauses contains the nouns,prepositions or modal auxiliaries describing psychological states,they will be transferred into mental clauses;if the relational or material clauses contains the nouns,verbs or adjectives describing physiological states,they will be transferred into behavioral clauses;if the material clause does not emphasize on actions but facts or relationships,it will be transferred into the relational clause.Therefore,process transfers in clauses result from the differences in language conventions between English and Chinese.Third,on the basis of the statistical results of the clauses with process transfers,the authoress discusses the translation strategy in Ba Jin’s translation.First,the authoress discusses the ideology of Ba Jin’s era,aiming to observe the translation strategies advocated by Chinese translation circles at that time from a macro perspective.The study finds that from 1915 to 1936,with the rise of the New Culture Movement,the trend of “rebuilding China” became the mainstream ideology.Therefore,the translation community advocated the “Europeanization” translation strategy,so as to transform Chinese literature and society;from 1937 to 1949,the outbreak of The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression made the thought “resisting Japanese aggression and saving Chinese nation” become the mainstream ideology.The translation community advocated that the translations should be more readable and acceptable.Ba Jin’s translation ideas were greatly influenced by the ideologies in the two periods.Second,through the analysis on the clauses with process transfers,the study finds that Ba Jin adopts a distinct translation strategy that the translations should be fluent on the basis of being faithful to the original texts.The principal translation method involved in Ba Jin’s version of “The Fisherman and His Soul” is literal translation.Although Ba Jin adjusts the source text of “The Fisherman and the Soul”,the meanings,language structures and logical sequences of clauses are preserved in his translation,making the translation faithful to the original text.Meanwhile,Ba Jin’s beautiful and fluent translation conforms to Chinese language conventions,which is widely accepted by Chinese readers.