A Contrastive Discourse Analysis Of Textual Function In English And Chinese Tourism Texts And Its Application In Translation

Since the 1960s, many scholars commenced the transplantation of relevant disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, sociology into translation in an attempt to illuminate translation studies from a different perspective. Among these, the application of discourse analysis theory to translation is an important attempt and has achieved some degree of success. This thesis applies one of the three metafunctions—the textual function theory of Halliday's systemic functional grammar into the contrastive analysis of tourism text in both English and Chinese and obtains the following results: in terms of cohesion, both English and Chinese texts abound in lexical cohesion and seldom use substitution. The difference exists in that English text uses more reference while Chinese has more ellipsis. In terms of coherence, the Constant Theme Pattern and Linear Theme Pattern dominate both texts. But there are great differences in the frequency of the Linear Theme Pattern, the constitution of Theme of the first sentence and the use of Marked Theme. After the contrastive analysis, this thesis applies the results to the Chinese-English translation of tourism text. The application lies in three aspects: the construction of translation strategy, the evaluation of translated text and the correction of translated text.There are four chapters in this thesis.Chapter one is literature review which briefly reviews the studies on contrastive discourse analysis, systemic functional grammar and constructive attempts accomplished by the pioneers in the field of the transplanting discourse analysis into translation study. Furthermore, this section also serves to clarify the purpose of this thesis and the collection and classification of the data in this thesis.Chapter two is the theoretical foundation of this thesis, which mainly introduces the theoretical framework of contrastive analysis—the textual function theory, one of the three metafunctions in Halliday's systemic functional grammar, and cohesion and coherence by which the textual function is realized. This section then elaborates on the main cohesive ties including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, and the concept of Theme and Rheme as well as thematic progression patterns.Chapter three makes a contrastive analysis of cohesion and coherence in Chinese and English tourism texts. This thesis makes contrastive analysis of English and Chinese texts in terms of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. It shows that both English and Chinese tourism text are extremely rich in lexical cohesion, accounting for over 70%, and rarely use substitution and conjunction. The difference lies in that English text abounds in reference while Chinese uses far more ellipsis. In addition, Chinese text has a unique use of four-character idioms and antithesis. In terms of coherence, this thesis makes the contrastive analysis of thematic progression in English and Chinese texts and obtains the following results: all of the four progression patterns are used in English and Chinese texts, in which the Constant Theme Pattern is most frequently used, followed by the Linear Theme Pattern while the Constant Rheme Pattern and the Inverted-Z Form Pattern are seldom used. It is therefore necessary to pay special attention to the choice of Theme of each sentence, because both the dominant Constant Theme Pattern and the second frequently used Linear Theme Pattern depend on the relation between the Theme of the sentence and the Theme or Rheme of the previous sentence. The proper choice of Theme can guarantee the information unfolds smoothly. The difference exists in that the constitution and information load of the first Themes in English texts are far more complicated than that of its Chinese counterparts. In addition, in terms of Marked Theme, there is a unique inverted sentence pattern to indicate the existence of the some objects in English texts.Chapter four applies the analysis results of chapter three to the Chinese-English translation of tourism texts. This thesis illustrates the possibility of applying the production of contrastive discourse analysis to the three layers of translation study—the construction of translation strategy, evaluation of the translated text, and correction of translated text. The study of translation from the perspective of discourse, going beyond clause level, makes the translated text more consistent with English in terms of cohesion and coherence. At the same time, the data used in this thesis is taken from famous scenic spots in Beijing, and therefore the study and correction of its translation has some practical value.