A Systemic-Functional Approach To English-Chinese Translation Of Journalistic English

Unnatural and awkward E-C translation of journalistic English is often found in Chinese newspapers. This thesis is an attempt to apply Systemic-Functional Linguistics to a study of E-C translation of a sub-variety of journalistic English—journalistic English on international politics (JEIP)—from a textual perspective, in hope of improving the quality of its E-C translation.It is held that a Text is a piece of language used in certain context of situation. The three elements of the situational context namely, "field", "tenor" and "mode" motivate respectively the Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual meanings, which are realized by linguistic elements at the lexico-grammatical level. So a good translation has to be a "textual equivalence" of the source language text.The data in this thesis includes ten texts, which are specific instances of JEIP. The five English texts are taken from The New York Times, and the five Chinese texts are excerpts of their translations published on Can Kao Xiao Xi (《参考消息》). Upon the application of SFL, it has been found that the problems of E-C translation of JEIP lie mainly 1) at the level of clause when clause is viewed as "message", "exchange" and "representation"; 2) above the clause, i. e., in clause complex; 3) around the clause, i. e., concerning cohesion and coherence.At the level of clause, the unmarked and marked information focus should be equally dealt with in the target language text as in the source language text, for they realize the Textual meaning. Both Temporal and Modal Finites in the Mood structure, which are easily neglected in E-C translation, should be kept in accordance with the source language text in the target language text, for they realize the Interpersonal meaning. And the Transitivity structure, realizing the Ideational meaning, is useful in dividing long and complicated English sentences and making the corresponding Chinese sentences idiomatic.At the level of clause complex, the embedded logic-semantic relations such as Clarification and Extension should be revealed in the target language text, by means of such punctuation marks as dash and colon.At the level of cohesion and coherence, Ellipsis, Conjunction, Synonym, Referential Chain and Thematic Progression, such cohesive devices as Reference, including Personal and Demonstrative Reference play an important role in achieving coherence in the target language text.