A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of C-E Texts From The Thematic Perspective

With the increasing frequency of academic exchange, the abstract as a special written genre is of great importance. A good abstract is a concentrated mirror of the whole research article (RA), enabling readers to comprehend the main contents as soon as possible. Due to the internationalization of academic communication, studies of abstracts'translation have been paid increasing attention by scholars both at home and abroad. However, the available literature shows that few studies have been conducted to investigate RA abstracts'translation from text level. Besides, recently the subject of translation studies has been shifted from culture back to language itself. It is common for scholars to adopt new linguistic findings in translation studies, especially text linguistics and functional linguistics, providing a unique perspective for analyzing translation theories and practice. Thematic structure and thematic progression (TP) in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL) are potentially analytic tools for unlocking texts and revealing their texture, enjoying crucial functions in the construction of texts and the organization of information.Under such kind of research background, this thesis makes a corpus of 95 corresponding Chinese-to-English (C-E) RA abstracts published in 2005 and 2006 from Chinese Translators Journal, which is the most authoritative translation journal in China. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses have been done on the basis of Halliday's thematic structure and TP, and T-tests of significance have been performed by using the software of SPSS.Three main research questions are as follows: (1) What are the characteristics of simple and multiple themes (including topical/experiential, textual and interpersonal elements) in English and Chinese RA abstracts respectively? Are there any significant quantitative differences? If there are, then why and in what aspects do the differences exist? (2) Is there a significant difference on marked and unmarked themes? What are their components? Is there any correlation between the original Chinese RA abstracts and the English counterparts? (3) Are there any special patterns of TP? If there are some significant differences, then why and in what aspects do they exist?Three main findings can be concluded according to the three corresponding research questions. First, topical simple themes exist in every RA abstract, while the percentage of topical themes in Chinese is much higher than that in English. There is a significant difference in textual themes, which reflects the hypotaxis characteristics of English language while parataxis of Chinese. The percentages of interpersonal themes in Chinese and English abstracts are both lower because of the veracity and accuracy of language in RA abstracts. Second, the percentages of unmarked themes in both Chinese and English abstracts are much higher than those of marked themes with a significant difference; however, there are no significant differences in marked themes. Always appearing in Chinese abstracts, elliptical themes reveal that Chinese is kind of semantic language of parataxis and Chinese texture is always linked by logic rather than the explicit conjunctions. Third, more than one kind of TP patterns have been used in every RA abstract. In order to avoid translationese, it is necessary and wise to abandon the original TP patterns and reconstruct the information flow in the target language.Through the empirical research on thematic structure and TP of C-E RA abstracts from the corpus, this thesis demonstrates that the information flow rather than the surface structure is the main contributor to construct discourse, and briefly puts forward three principles in C-E abstracts'translation: (1) Decide one main subject and minimize the predicates in English text; (2) Break long Chinese sentence into several clauses according to the logic of coherence, making the implicit cohesion explicit if necessary; (3) Abandon the original TP patterns and reconstruct the discourse which is more appropriate for target readers, maintaining the accuracy of information flow (if necessary, supplement the missing background information).