| The prose Tao Hua Yuan Ji, created by Tao Yuanming, sketches a fairy land of peach blossoms anddescribes an ideal realm of peaceful and tranquil life as well as pure and simple folkway, which iscompletely opposite to the unrest of social reality in the alternate period of Jin and Song Dynasties. Thewhole prose shows Tao Yuanming’s dissatisfaction with the reality and his great longing for a better lifeand the ideal society. The language in this classic prose is pure and natural, also makes an aesthetic andfascinating feeling to read. Hence it becomes a well-known literary gem with its great ideological valueand artistic value.Such a great prose becomes a natural choice of distinguished translators from Chinese to English.Also it is natural to do a discussion and a comparison among different versions. In terms of the Englishtranslations of Tao Hua Yuan Ji, the previous scholars develop their translation studies from theperspectives of semantics, translator’s subjectivity, cultural context, etc. But the Grammatical Metaphoris ignored. GM is one of the most important theories in systemic functional linguistics, which isapplicable in the general discourse analysis, also in the specific discourse analysis - translation studies.This thesis has made a contrastive analysis and the description of two English translations of Tao HuaYuan Ji from a new perspective, Grammatical Metaphor theory in SFL, and has proven the feasibilityand operability of GM in the study of discourse translation.The paradise described by Tao in Tao Hua Yuan Ji owns a unique style, which not only creates aUtopian and illusory mood, also reproduces a raw portrayal of the pastoral life of the author. Thelanguage of this prose is plain, natural, fresh and clear. Therefore, to achieve the translation, it isdifficult to reach the equivalence of meaning, form and cultural artistic conception to the source text.This contrastive analysis of Birch’s version and Giles’s version shows the following findings.1) Grammatical metaphor theory helps us understand the original deeper and more detailed fromlinguistics, and thus reappear the original text faithfully in the translation of target text. In this process,the translator should not just understand the works literally, but also should apply grammatical metaphorto explore the connotation of the works in order to achieve the finding that different language formscorrespond to different language functions. By using the grammatical metaphor theory reasonably, thecultural background and the textual value of the original text could be revealed better. Therefore,grammatical metaphor theory has the operability and powerful explanation in prose translation. 2) In addition, in the prose translation, especially in translating the prose works like Tao Hua YuanJi, it would be very crucial for the translators to understand the ancient Chinese culture accurately anddeeply by using grammatical metaphor. Giles, with his profound Chinese culture and a deepunderstanding of author’s writing purpose, appropriately uses metaphorical form, includingnominalization, adjectivization, and subjects concentration, etc. in the translation. And his concisesentence structures, some of which even rhyme, accurately express the emotions of the author’s desireto pastoral life without interference with secular life and effectively convey the illusory mood oforiginal text, thus reaching the equivalence of resemble in form and spirit. Birch also has severalremarkable uses of grammatical metaphor in expressing the author’s mood, but most of his translatedsentences, following the form and structure of original sentence, are translated into congruent form.Therefore the two translators both apply metaphorical form, but overall Giles’s translation weighs morethan Birch’s.3) Finally, the results of the study in a sense provide the alternative skill and reference to prosetranslation from Chinese to English, and further studies are pointed out at last. |
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