The Role Of CF Marked Themes In Textual Construction In Chinese-english Translation From The Perspective Of Text Linguistics

Chinese-English translation concerns not only the mere replacement of textualmaterials in the source language by equivalent textual materials in the target language,but also, more importantly, the realization of textual equivalence which requires thattext be considered as the basic unit of translation. The Theme-Rheme structureproposed by Halliday (2004) provides strong theoretical support for Chinese-Englishtranslation on the basis of text. The Theme-Rheme structure plays a significant role inrealizing textual function through the sequence of different elements within clauses inwritten language. Marked theme, one kind of theme, is more meaningful than othersas it is the result of choice for achieving textual function, which can serve as aneffective tool in textual construction.Marked theme, according to Davies (1989) and Yu Weishen (2002), is classifiedinto two kinds: marked theme which has no function of discourse organization (Zhang,2006:23) and marked theme with context frame (CF marked theme). The first kind ofmarked theme is often produced by the fronting of complement, object or predicator,and the use of inverted word order. The second kind of marked theme, CF markedtheme, refers to that kind of theme signifying time, place, addition and transition. Andthe use of CF marked themes in textual construction can help produce an acceptabletext.In this thesis, the Bid Report for the22ndWorld Orchid Conference in2017(hereinafter referred to as the Bid Report) and the two translated texts of the BidReport are chosen as materials for study. In the Bid Report, there are many Chinese-box style sentences in which the first topic comprises several new topics andcommon-topic style sentences in which a topic is followed by adjectives and subject-predicate structures as comments. This requires that translators should treat the sourcetext as a message rather than a mere string of linguistic units and construct the targettext with a deep analysis of the logic and structure of the source text. And the twotranslated texts are produced by student translators and professional translatorsrespectively. Based on Davies (1989) and Yu Weishen (2002)’s classification of CFmarked themes, CF marked themes used in the two translated texts are classified intoseven kinds for analysis. For measuring the role of CF marked themes in textualconstruction, seven standards of textuality raised by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) will be employed. Results show that CF marked themes play an important role intextual construction in Chinese-English translation. The use of CF marked themes canhelp produce a text with cohesion and coherence, transfer the intention of textproducers to text receivers, highlight certain information, balance the distribution ofinformation in the clause, and serve as a natural method for discourse organizationwhich can be well accepted by text receivers. And the use of CF marked themes intranslating two kinds of topic-prominent sentences including Chinese-topic stylesentences and common-topic style sentences with overloaded information can helpproduce a text with clear structure and logic.