A Contrastive Study Of Thematic Structure In English And Chinese: An Approach To Translation

Translation is essentially the representation in one language of what is written or said in another language. It inevitably involves a contrastive study between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). Only when possessing a good knowledge of the similarities and differences between the two languages concerned can a translator make proper choices in representing faithfully the meanings of the original in accordance with the habitual expressing way of the TL.According to Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, language has three metafunctions: the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function. Respectively, they express three kinds of meanings, namely, the ideational meaning, the interpersonal meaning and the textual meaning. Each of the three types of meaning contributes equally to the meaning of the clause as a whole. As Nida (1982) puts it, translating means translating meaning. It is therefore desirable to put equal weight on all the three kinds of meanings in translation. However, traditional translation studies seem to lay stress on the first two while not paying enough attention to the last. Based on Halliday's Functional Grammar, this thesis investigates the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in thematic structure, which is the grammatical realization of the textual meaning, and how these similarities and differences influence translation.This thesis consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The first chapter studies the syntactic constituents in Theme position and the coincidence between Theme and Subject in the declarative clause of English and Chinese. The study shows that Chinese is more flexible than English in choosing what constituents to be Theme, since verb phrases, adjective phrases and post-position structures occur normally in Theme position in Chinese. Besides, Theme is more frequently identicalwith Subject in English than in Chinese, and there are a large number of clauses with zero Subject realizing Theme in Chinese. The author therefore suggests that a translator give full consideration to the differences between English and Chinese in thematic choice and avoid blindly copying the original thematic structure in the target version.The second chapter first introduces briefly the notion of markedness, and then looks into the differences between English and Chinese in marked condition. The contrastwe analysis indicates that the thematic fronting of Object in English is a result of the left-movement thus marked, but in Chinese it is generated inherently thus unmarked. In translation, it is proposed that an unmarked or a marked structure in the SL be replaced correspondingly by an equally unmarked or a marked one in the TL, for a marked Theme always carries more meaning than an unmarked one. When it is impossible to find an equally marked structure in the TL, the translator can resort to some extra lexical devices to represent the special emphasis signaled by a marked structure in the original.The third chapter focuses on a contrastive study of the information status of Theme between English and Chinese. The conclusion is that the English Theme can carry New or Given or Zero information, but the thematic information is always Given in Chinese. This difference stems from the different principles of clause construction in English and Chinese. In English, the principles of end-weight and end-focus correlate with each other in organizing the clause, and in case of conflict the former normally takes precedence over the latter. However, Chinese seems to observe the principle of end-focus only. Accordingly, there is a strong tendency in Chinese to put the known or old information previous to the unknown of new. Considering that English does not have this tendency, this chapter then discusses tentatively how to rearrange certain English thematic structures in English-Chinese translation to achieve information equivalence as well as to keep in line with the Chinese habitual way of expressio...