| Thematic progression, an important way to achieve textual cohesion and semanticcoherence, is helpful for translators to reflect the writer’s writing purpose and the aestheticand practical value of the original text by coherent and fluent target language. Therefore, ithas drawn great attention from researchers both at home and abroad.Most of the previous studies have focused on discussing the effect of thematicprogression on translation from the macro perspective or analyzing and appreciating aspecific literary work from the micro perspective. With the development of relevant studies,researchers have applied the thematic progression theory to text analysis of various genres,including news reviews, public speeches, novels, political articles, scientific andtechnological papers, medical texts, and tourist materials, etc. However, there are fewstudies analyzing and comparing English and Chinese essays under the thematicprogression theory. In view of this, the current paper divides clauses in the target essaysbased on the Theme-Rheme theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and then makescomparative analysis of the thematic progression patterns in the texts in a qualitative andquantitative way according to the thematic progression theory, with a view to investigatingthe similarities and differences between English and Chinese essays in the configuration ofthematic progression patterns, and pointing out the implications of thematic progressiontheory for essay translation.The corpus for this study consists of10English,10Chinese essays, and theircorresponding translations. They are composed by notable writers and rendered by seniortranslators. In light of the previous studies and the features of this corpus, the current studysummarizes6thematic progression patterns: constant, focused, linear, split, combined andalternative. The present study is designed to investigate the similarities and differencesbetween English and Chinese essays in the configuration of the above6patterns, and thetendency of translations in the adoption of these patterns. The results show that:1) Both in English and Chinese essays, the most preferred thematic progression patterns are theconstant, the focused and the linear pattern. The split, the combined and the alternativepattern occur less frequently, and there exists difference in the order of their frequencybetween these two groups of original essays;2) The translations show a similar tendency inadopting these patterns with their respective original essays, that is, the constant patternoccurs most frequently, followed by the focused and the linear ones, and the split, thecombined and the alternative patterns are also the last three ones that have different ordersof frequency between the two groups of translations, showing a tendency towards theconfiguration in the original essays. Given the above results, this thesis proposes that thecriterion for evaluating essay translation could take the consistency of thematic progressionin the translation and that in the original text as a reference. We suggest that, in the processof translating, the translator first analyze the Theme-Rheme structure and the thematicprogression patterns of the original essay. After having a full understanding of the writer’sthought and writing plan, the translator could maintain the thematic progression of theoriginal text in his or her translation as far as possible; if it is impossible to be maintainedbecause of the vacancy between the two languages, the translator could make certainadjustments to make the translation coherent, fluent and readable.The findings of this study are of certain value both in terms of academic research andtranslation practice. It will not only enrich the genre of studies concerning thematicprogression and provide relevant data for further studies on translation, but also helptranslators better understand the composing mechanism of English and Chinese essays,thus shedding light on essay translation. |
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