A Comparative Study On Thematic Structure In Yin Jiu (V) By Tao Yuanming And Its English Translations

This thesis is an attempt to study the translation of the poem Yin Jiu (v) in the framework of Halliday's Functional Grammar (FG). In the literature to date, there has been an evident trend of applying Halliday's theory to translation studies. Many scholars scholars have successfully utilized Hallidayan Linguistics with reference to a range of translation issues. In this thesis, Tao Yuanming's famous poem Yin Jiu (v) is selected as the object of the study, and the author attempts to analyze and compare thematic structures in its three English translations.Through Study, the author finds that because of the ambiguity of content and uniqueness of poetic form, thematic structure of this Yin Jiu (V) and its three English translations is special in the following three aspects:firstly, themes of Chinese clauses are mostly verb phrases, so they are marked themes, while in the English translations themes are mostly unmarked theme which are caused by the strict English grammatical rules. Secondly, themes of English translations are mostly multiple themes by adding some textual themes, but the source text has a large percentage of simple themes; lastly, clausal themes appear in both source text and translated text, but they did not correspond in the same clause complex. Therefore, we may find that thematic structure are flexible in translating Chinese classical poems in order to match the requirements of this unique language form.This thesis contains four chapters. The first chapter presents an introduction of this thesis as a whole, and a general survey of the studies that have been done by several foreign and Chinese scholars on this subject. The second chapter gives a brief overview of Halliday's Thematic Structure theory with detailed introduction of identification and classification of theme. Chapter three identifies the themes of each clause and then compare them, and evaluates the effects for different thematic choices in its three English translations, and then summarizes translator's considerations. Chapter 4 is a conclusion of the whole thesis.It is hoped that the present study will provide a good insight into the translation studies, especially issues about poetic translation and that the applicability of Systemic-Functional Linguistics to poetic translation is well tested.