A Study Of Three English Versions Of Zhu Ziqing's Lotus Pond By Moonlight-A Textual Perspective

Lotus Pond by Moonlight is one of the classic proses written in plain words by the noted Chinese writer Zhu Ziqing in 1920s. With its aesthetic beauty, this prose has attracted numerous readers as well as many translators at home and abroad. This thesis aims at making a comparative study of the three English versions rendered by Howard Goldblatt, Zhu Chunshen, and Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang respectively from a textual perspective.As we all know, translation is a process realized on texts, rather than on words or phrases. The ultimate aim of translation is to achieve a relatively equivalent rendering at textual level. According to Mona Baker, translation equivalence at textual level is mainly realized through two respects, i.e. cohesion and information flow (thematic structure in particular), and the final product of translation should therefore have its own textual cohesion and ways of information organization. However, due to the hypotactic feature of English and paratactic feature of Chinese, there exists great difference in the selection of cohesive devices and the organization of information. Therefore, the translator needs to make some adjustments in reestablishing cohesion and making the information flow naturally in the target text in some cases.With such awareness in mind, the author carries out a contrastive study of cohesive devices and thematic organizations of the three English versions of Zhu Ziqing's Lotus Pond by Moonlight with a focus on their implications for Chinese-English translation. For the purpose of this thesis, we only discuss grammatical cohesion (reference, ellipsis and conjunction), which has a close relationship with thematic analysis. By analyzing those cohesive devices, we find that the use of cohesive devices varies greatly in the two languages and appropriate transformation is of vital importance to the realization of coherence in the target text. Furthermore, we analyze the thematic organization in the three English versions and find that appropriate thematic organization is another effective way to achieve textual cohesion and coherence in Chinese-English (C-E) translation. In the process of C-E translation, the translator should arrange themes and rhemes of clauses appropriately so as to make clauses integrated into a structural whole and information flow fluent in the target text.