A Systemic Comparison Of The English And Chinese Texts Of Pride And Prejudice

Owing to its romantic plot and superb language, Pride and Prejudice as a classical novelenjoys a great audience and a good reputation in China as well in the West. Compared withthe over two hundred years of study of Jane Austen’s original, the Chinese versions of thenovel have just been studied for about50years, presently attracting increasingly moreattention from relevant scholars. Among all the Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice, SunZhili’s version is regarded as the most acceptable one and has been printed for many times,and is therefore worthwhile to study. Ever since it was published, many studies haveconducted on it with accordant achievements. Studies so far, however, are not systemicenough and are often partial in one respect or another. Under the guidance of JiaZhengchuan’s Dialectical Systemic Philosophy of Translation and his Systemic Approach toDiscourse Analysis, based on theories of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,this thesis attempts to conduct a systemic comparison of Sun’s Chinese translation of Prideand Prejudice with the original on the contextual, semantic and stylistic levels.The comparison of the two texts on contextual level is made in three aspects. Firstly, it ismade in terms of their respective economic, political, cultural and social settings of writing ortranslation. Secondly, it is made in terms of the writers’ or translators’ life, including theireducational backgrounds, personalities and writing styles. Thirdly, the comparison is made interms of their target readers. It is found that, although there are many differences betweenSun’s and Austen’s texts in terms of their settings of production, their producers’ personalexperiences and their intended readers, Sun’s translation is consistent with its contextualfeatures especially the language habits of his intended readers and is functionally equivalentto Austen’s original text.The comparison of the two texts on semantic level is made in two aspects. Firstly, it ismade in terms of their macro-semantic structures, including their plots, main ideas andexpressions, and their degrees of semantic coherence. Secondly, the comparison is made interms of the micro-semantic structure, including the meaning structure of sentences and phrase and words. It is found that Sun successfully expresses the whole plot and the main ideaof Austen’s original and his whole text achieves semantic coherence conforming to Chineseconventions as well as the original does in English. Sun Zhili has a good master of Chineseusage and can choose different translation methods according to different situations, whichreproduces both the surface and deep meaning of the original naturally and equally. Histranslation, therefore, is semantically equivalent to the original text.The comparison of the two texts on stylistic level is also made in two aspects. Firstly, itis made in terms of their macro-stylistic features, including their whole structures andformations and their ways of realizing cohesion by reference and substitution. Secondly, thecomparison is made in terms of the micro-stylistic features, including their syntactic, lexicaland rhetorical features. It is found that Sun’s Chinese text maintains the same formal structurewith the original and tends to use as cohesive devices more repetitions (e.g. of person names)and omissions (e.g. of determiners like “the”) than reference and substitution which arecommon in the original. Sun’s text is mostly consistent with the original in syntactic andlexical effect but tends to divide the long sentences in the original into shorter ones accordingto Chinese norms. Sun also obtains a good understanding of and vividly reproduces therhetorical intention of the original. His translation is thus stylistically equivalent to theoriginal text.This study may be theoretically and practically valuable for the translation of Pride andPrejudice in particular and literary translation in general. Theoretically, it may compensate forthe methodological inadequacy in the relevant areas of study. Practically, this study may havesome implications for literary translation practice, arousing more translators’ attention to thedifferences between Chinese and English literary texts.