A Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Metafunction

Pride and Prejudice is regarded as one of the most famous novels, and there are more than twelve Chinese translation versions in China. The Chinese version translated by Wang Keyi is popular in China. Wang's version is interesting and humorous, while somewhere Wang Keyi does not get the proper understanding about the novel. Zhang Ling and Zhang Yang's translation version appears later than Wang's, the translation is very simple, while the translation is too simple to reproduce the original flavor of the novel. Some translation theorists have applied different theories to the explanation of the phenomena which appear in the two translation versions.In the late of the twentieth century, Systemic Functional Linguistics proposed by Halliday had become very famous. Systemic Functional Linguistics has integrated idealistic system, academic system, and unique investigative methods. Systemic Functional Linguistics can help us to understand the essence and the function of the language, and it can be directly applied to teaching, translation study, and the contrastive study of language, and so on. Metafunction is the central concept of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics, and it can be subdivided into: Ideational Function, Interpersonal Function and Textual Function. The applications of Metafunction in translation are various, from translation teaching, punctuation marks in E-C translation to C-E translation of Tang poetry, and so on. However, most of the studies focus on the context application to analyze the discourses, yet it is found that little has been done to apply Metafunction to the explanation of the phenomena which appear in literary translation. Guided by Halliday's Metafunction, this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of Wang's and Zhang's translation versions of Pride and Prejudice.