| Translation is an important and complex cross-cultural communicative activity,with the writers in the source language, translators and the readers in the targetculture as the participants, which can be investigated from various perspectives suchas those of cultural studies and linguistic analysis. With the rapid development oftranslation studies and modern linguistics, it may be quite beneficial to integrate thesetwo disciplines by applying the insights of systemic functional linguistics totranslation studies.The interpersonal functions in systemic functional linguistics focus on theinteractive relationship between the writer in the source text and the intended readersin the target language and culture, observing how the speaker uses language toexpress his/her own attitude and to influence the listener and how people uselanguage to communicate with each other to establish and maintain their interactiverelationship. In order to reveal the importance of interpersonal meaning to translationstudies, this thesis attempts to analyze the construction of interpersonal meaning inLin Yutang’s and Yang Xianyi’s two translations of Pygmalion on the basis ofsystemic functional linguistics.Modality is a sub-system of interpersonal meaning in systemic functionallinguistics as well as the main means of interpersonal function realization in discourseanalysis. In this subsystem, modal operators, mood adjuncts, predicates and metaphorof modality are methods to express modality, according to Halliday. The thesis makeseffort to analyze some conversations in Pygmalion and their three counterparts in thecorresponding Chinese translations, comparing the three Chinese translations in termsof the means for interpersonal meaning realization, in particular, the distribution ofmodal operators, the types and polarity of adjuncts, the passive and adjectiveexpressions in predicates, and the objective and subjective expressions in metaphor ofmodality.Appraisal system is composed of three subsystems, namely, attitude, engagementand graduation. In this thesis, efforts are made in chapter five to analyze the appraisal system embodied in the source text Pygmalion and the target text translations,attempting to reveal the relationship between the writer and the reader by means ofappropriateness of interpersonal meaning construction in the target texts from theaspects of attitude, engagement and graduation.The analyses of the interpersonal meaning construction, based on theconversations of the source text Pygmalion and its Chinese translations from theperspective of the modality and the appraisal systems, indicate that translators shouldmake great efforts to construct an appropriate interpersonal relationship between thesource language and the target languages, with the aim of enhancing the readability ofthe translated drama text for the target language reader. Through the study, we can getthat compared with Lin Yutang’s version and Yang Xianyi’s first version, Yang’ssecond one maintains the interpersonal meaning of the source language text in abetter way, and the interpersonal meaning in systemic functional linguistics willdefinitely make translation studies have a further development in the future. |
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