On The Translation And Realization Of The Clausal Interpersonal Meaning

Recently, the developments of context-sensitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies and artificial intelligence have provided a new perspective for the translation studies. This perspective attributes the central role to the translator in the process of cross-cultural communication (Hatim and Mason,1990:35). Discourse analysis approach, which came to prominence in translation studies in the 1990s, adopts this perspective. Influenced greatly by Halliday's systemic functional model, this discipline deals with translation within the social context. Although it has drawn many scholars' interests and attention recently, some of its fields have been ignored by the Chinese scholars. For instance, some genres, such as the expressive type, including poetry, drama, and biography are seldom studied. In other words, the study on the interpersonal meaning of drama discourse is rare. Meanwhile, the ideational function and the textual function are studied thoroughly and people pay little attention to the interpersonal function.With this theoretical background, this thesis endeavors to probe into the study of the translation of the interpersonal meaning of a drama on the basis of two versions of Teahouse, which are translated respectively by Ying Ruocheng from China and by John Howard-Gibbon from Canada. After studying the interpersonal meaning thoroughly, a comparative study of the interpersonal meaning between English and Chinese has been conducted by the author through the mood system, modality system, modal assessment, and the interjections, which will be the theoretical framework of the present analysis. For the sake of convenience, the analysis will be done on two levels:lexical/phrasal level and clausal level. On the lexical/phrasal level, the translation of the modality system, modal assessment and interjections will be the main concern, and the translation of the mood system will be studied on the clausal level. The author proposes that the translation of the modal responsibility and modal commitment should be the two main focuses when translating the interpersonal meaning. Besides, the translator should also pay attention to the visual effect as well as acoustic images when translating a drama. What is more, both the translating strategies and decisions are also studied in this thesis.By this means, the author wishes that this thesis can draw some attention to the translation studies on the English versions of Teahouse, in the hope that it may have some enlightenment on the study of the interpersonal meaning within the drama translation studies.