Theme-rheme Theory And Long English Sentence Translation In Texts

As a theme-prominent language, English texts tend to be highly hypotactic in constructing sentences, which have strict structures and clear and obvious logical relations among their components. In contrast, Chinese, as a topic-prominent language, is highly paratactic. Chinese sentences are usually shorter than English ones and they have loose structures without obvious logical relations in form. Long sentences are frequently used to express complex ideas in English, but translating these long sentences into Chinese has been difficult all along and has always been an important topic in translating researches.Presently, a lot of articles on the translation of long English sentences have been published. However, most of these articles only enumerate several examples and study long sentences that are de-textualized. Few researches have been made on long English sentence translation based on texts. In this situation, the emergence of text linguistics in the 1960s affords us a new perspective of researching long sentence translation. This thesis takes the theme-rheme theory in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretic framework and combines the methods of qualitative and quantitative researches to investigate the translation of long English sentences in texts. Methods and strategies of translating long English sentences are researched to deepen the cognition of long sentence translation, on the basis of which general principles of long sentence translation are summarized.In this research, the statistic method to calculate the average is adopted to fix on the length of a long sentence as a reference. Then data of six chapters are selected randomly from Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure and corresponding parts from two Chinese translations are selected correspondingly. Long sentences and their contextual sentences in the six chapters are taken as data and examples for research. Ratios of Thematic Progression (TP) patterns being preserved and reconstructed in Target Texts (TTs) as well as methods of the reconstruction of TP patterns are acquired through statistic analysis. Meanwhile, researches are made on the degree of coherence of TTs in the cases of TP patterns being preserved and reconstructed respectively, and the concept of untranslatability is used to explain the reconstruction of TP patterns in TTs.Through statistic and empirical analysis, the following conclusions are reached: 1) preserving TP patterns in the Source Texts is of a high percentage in the practice of translating long English sentences into Chinese and it is also a frequently-used method of ensuring coherence of TTs; 2) in the practice of translating long English sentences into Chinese, three methods are often used to reconstruct TP patterns in TTs, that is, interchange between theme and rheme of a long sentence, establishment of new themes in TTs and adjustment of theme and rheme of the contextual sentences; 3) in the cases of reconstructing TP patterns in the TTs, it is easier to realize coherence of the TTs if the long sentence is generally translated according to its original clausal sequence without major adjustments. Otherwise, the coherence of TTs tends to be affected; 4) adjustment of clausal sequence of contextual sentences may also be a cause of reconstructing Thematic Progression patterns in TTs and affects the coherence of TTs to a certain degree.