The Difference Of Foreground Background In English And Chinese Word Order And Its Translation

This paper, within the framework of cognitive linguistics, makes a contrastive study of ordering F/G relationships in English and Chinese through mapping F/G relationship into syntactic structures, so as to study the strategy applied in translation.It is inevitable to change the order of words in translation. Existing studies mainly focus on changes of word order from the perspective of syntax, such as the readjustment of the position of attributives or adverbials. There are only a few studies concerning about semantic analysis of word order. Cognitive linguistics focus on semantic motivation for ordering information in languages. As for the figure-ground asymmetry, lots of studies confirm that different languages present it in different word orders, which proposes a theoretical basis for the readjustment of orders of words which express asymmetric relationship in translation.The present study, looking into the regular pattern of mapping F/G relationship as syntactic structures in both English and Chinese through the analysis of examples in different levels, the study draws out that: 1) generally speaking, English shares a common tendency in ordering Figure and Ground relationship with Chinese in most structures, whereas the differences are also very distinct. 2) On the level of context, there are more factors influencing F/G order. Both English and Chinese would readjust the F/G order so as to keep the text coherent. It would be more difficult for translators to analyze the F/G order in the original text and he/she may pay more attention to consider how to arrange the F/G order in the target text. Studies on applying F/G theory into translation should focus more on the context so that the findings would be more practical in translation.