Thematic Progression And Translation--A Textual Perspective

This paper is a tentative study to adopt text linguistics to translation studies, attempting to test the applicability of a particular functional resource — Prague school scholar Frantisek Danes' thematic progression patterns — to the mutual translation of Chinese and English from textual perspective. In addition, Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, especially the theme-rheme division, serves as theoretical basis for analysis on sentence level. Functional approach to explaining the interactional organization of sentences suggests that a sentence consists of two segments, theme and rheme. Theme + rheme configuration organizes the clause as a message. But this approach is confined to sentence boundaries. The notion of thematic progression gets rid of this sentence-orientedness. It refers to the way subsequent discourse re-uses previous themes and rhemes according to an overall text plan. It might be viewed as the skeleton of the text. All texts show thematic progression, and they move from theme to rheme in recognizable patterns. Thematic progression extends the concept of theme as point of a single sentence to that of explaining the inner connexity of texts and is more dynamic. It can be regarded as a potentially analytic tool for unlocking texts and revealing their texture. As a structural cohesive mechanism, it correlates with the method of development of the text and contributes to text cohesion and coherence. Thus, it provides a particular textual perspective to translation studies and deserves much more attention. An analysis of thematic progression can show the text moves from concept to concept, building up information beyond sentence boundaries, creating expectation and fulfilling them. So, before translation, one should analyze thematic progression of ST and have a better understanding of its method of development; and in the process of translation, one needs to maintain or adjust, if necessary, certain features of ST organization in line with preferred ways of organizing text in the TL, thus achieving textual equivalence.This paper is divided into 5 parts. The first part is the brief introduction, which deals with the research background, the theoretical basis, and the feasibility of the application of thematic progression to translation studies. Then, the six terms — theme, rheme, given, new, topic, and thematic progression — are defined and distinctions between topic and subject, theme and topic, are illustrated with examples.The second part reviews literature related to the present study from different aspects. First, Prague School's Functional Sentence Perspective, especially Danes' thematic progression, and Halliday's theme and rheme theory are discussed and differentiated. Second, the application of thematic progression to Chinese and English studies is covered briefly. Some scholars and their works are mentioned and their research proves to be enlightening. Third, this part also surveys the application of thematic progression to translation studies, which is insightful and throws light on the present study.Part three is concerned with a brief contrast of thematic progression between Chinese and English texts, which involves two levels: clausal and textual. It lays a foundation for the later discussion. The contrast of theme and rheme on clausal level includes simple themes, multiple themes and clause as themes. Then, the contrast ofthematic progression on textual level are carried out, involving six patterns, namely, linear pattern, constant theme pattern, focused pattern, alternating pattern, cross-thematic pattern and rheme-split pattern. The rough contrast indicates that all the above six patterns do exist in Chinese and English texts, but their manifestations are different in some ways since Chinese and English are two totally different languages. These differences are of special value and significance to translation.Part four is the core of the discussion, which demonstrates the textual perspective to translation through analysis of thematic progression of ST and TT. Because of the paratact...