A Study On Chinese-English Literary Translation Based On Halliday’s Thematic Theory

This thesis, based on Halliday’s thematic theory, conducts a comparative study on Chinese woman writer Wang Anyi’s excellent novella Liu Shi and Howald Goldblatt’s translation Lapse of Time, trying to find out translation methods of themes, and giving suggestions for Chinese-English literary translation practice.First, the thesis reviews the origin and development of thematic theory, focuses on Halliday’s thematic theory grounded in systemic functional linguistics. Although there are a lot of differences between English and Chinese language, from the perspective of metafunctions, both languages have ideational, interpersonal and textual functions; from the angle of lexicology, both languages have similar word meanings; from the point of syntax, both languages have the same syntactic constituents. Therefore, Halliday’s thematic theory can be applied in analyzing Chinese language.Second, this thesis explores the language characteristics of Liu Shi, namely colloquialism, philosophical beauty and elaborate description. By a comparative study of the themes in Liu Shi and the themes in Goldblatt’s translation, three corresponding relationship can be found, which are metafunction invariance, metafunction addition and metafunction reduction. Metafunction invariance means the metafunctions of the themes in both ST and TT are the same. Metafunction addition means the metafunctions of the themes in TT are more than that of the themes in ST. Metafunction reduction means metafunctions of the themes in TT are less than that of the themes in ST. Based on the three corresponding relationship, the thesis summarizes the translation methods of themes.Finally, the thesis gives suggestions for doing Chinese-English literary translation practice, in the hope of realizing the complete transference of both content and form, and preserving the artistic value of Chinese literary works.