An Application Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Classical Chinese Poetry Translation

One of Halliday's aims to construct the Systemic-Functional Grammar (hereafter SFG) is to provide a theoretical framework for discourse analysis. The theory of Grammatical Metaphor (hereafter GM) is a dispensable part of the SFG.Up till now, domestically, there have been many scholars applying the GM theory into scientific discourse and news discourse for analysis, or making a comparative study between Chinese and English texts, which have tested the applicability and practicability. As for the field of translation studies on classical Chinese poetry(hereafter CCP), however, the researches are almost from literary and aesthetic perspectives based on the criterion of"Three Beauties"by Xu Yuanchong but still remaining many problems unsolved. With the development of linguistic translation study in SFG, Huang Guowen has successfully applied the SFG theory into the translation studies on Chinese Classical Poetry from the perspectives of three metafunctions and context respectively and explored the new field of translation study in linguistics but researches in GM are still rare.CCP is featured by terse language with metaphors and profound meanings. As an important medium for cultural communication, the translation of CCP bears great significance in promoting the great cultural heritage to the whole world. Hong Lou Meng, as a representative of the splendid Chinese culture, is one of the most outstanding novels in Chinese classical literature. Those poems in the novel, as an indispensable part of the whole novel, are made the illuminating point, foreshadowing the fate or destiny of the figures in the novel. The study on its poetry has become the hot point in the field of translated versions of Hong Lou Meng. The heroine of the novel Lin Daiyu's Elegy on Flowers is one of the famous poems drawing much attention of researchers.This thesis, based on the GM theory under the framework of SFG, attempts to investigate the translation studies on Chinese Classical Poetry from the perspective of GM theory with data from the Chinese poem Elegy on Flowers and its three famous translated English versions so as to explore how this theory works in poetry translation, offer some inspirations and further test the applicability and practicability of SFG theory.The whole thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One serves as a brief introduction to the general framework of the present study. Chapter Two reviews the domestic poetry translation situation and the linguistic translation studies both at home and abroad and points out the existing problems as well as the theory about context. Then a review of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory ,the theoretical foundation of this thesis, and its applicability are dealt with in Chapter Three. Chapter Four first introduces the data collection as well as its contextual analysis; then the contrastive case study of the data on GM and a tentative summary of findings are given. Chapter Five, the last chapter, provides a brief summary of the thesis and at the same time some tentative conclusions are drawn.