| There has been a trend in translation studies that influences from related disciplines have contributed to new emphases in the methods of translation studies. Most obviously, an interdisciplinary emphasis has evolved: scholars borrow ideas from pragmatics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis or some other disciplines or a combination of disciplines which turns out to be methodologically useful. Interest in applying Functional Grammar into translation studies has been on the rise. Scholars at home and abroad have made quite a few attempts in applying systemic functional linguistics as a framework of analysis, since the focus of study of functional linguistics is communication with language, which is exactly the purpose of translation. They point out the importance of register membership analysis in translation. Some Chinese scholars also make attempts to apply FG to the analysis of Chinese poetry translation. These studies shed valuable insights into building up a multidisciplinary branch of translation studies. But much remains to be done. What is lacking is a systemic contrastive study of ST and TT and the translating decisions based on the sound data (corpus) from actual translating practice. Relying on the claim that FG is a grammar designed to study the universal characteristics of languages, this dissertation attempts to bring the two language systems and rhetorical conventions to the study of textual transfer. This author has chosen news reporting, the most familiar type of writing in modern society, as the object of analysis. It sets out to explore the patterns of lexico-grammatical choices in ST and TT contrastively and what the patterns reveal about the generic conventions in the two language systems. An added dimension of research is how the patterns differ and the possible explanations. The ten pairs of samples are mainly drawn from two sources. Eight of them are published articles by some world-famous agencies or newspapers, such as Associated Press and Reuters, etc. The translated versions are drawn from Guide to English Newspaper Reading and Understanding (Ma, 2002). The author himself is an experienced journalist. Two of them are downloaded from the website:http://language.chinadaily.com.cn/bilingual.shtml. Therefore it is safe to say that they are representative.Following FG, this author analyses 10 pairs of samples of news reporting in terms of process types, modal elements and thematic elements. The analysis concludes that ST and TT seem to share similar generic structures: Material processes seem to dominate in both ST and TT, Relational processes take the second position in the proportion of process types. The similarity can be well explained by the function of news reporting and the experiential metafunction in the framework of FG. Modal operators with the meaning of willingness/ ability such as "will", "should", "can", etc. are not frequently used. No modal operators with the meaning of obligation are used in both ST and TT. However, Chinese tends to use more adjectives and nouns with appraisal meanings to express interpersonal meanings. Theme analysis shows that there are far more instances of Experiential Theme than the other two types of Theme in both ST and TT. Among the two types of Experiential Theme, Subject Theme, expressed as the participant(s) of the issue/event being described quite outnumbers Adjunct Theme. The noticeable difference in choices of thematic elements and the cohesive ability of Theme in English and Chinese can be seen in the analysis. These findings taken together illuminate the relationship of lexical-grammatical choices and the metafunctions realized through such choices. The finding that there are steady similarities between ST and TT suggests the generic features of news reporting across languages. The fact that there are more Material and Relational processes in both ST and TT reflects the norms that news reporting represents the actual happenings in the external world. The rarity of modal elements and the clearly indicated sour...
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