A Study Of Xu Yuanchong’s Translation Of Tang Poems From The Perspective Of Logical Metafunction

Tang Poems, as the treasure of Chinese culture, is imbued with abundant culturalconnotation and strong sense of artistic charm, which represent the highestachievement among Chinese Classical Poems. Therefore, the translation of TangPoems into English makes a great difference in spreading Chinese culture to theoutside effectively and promoting the Sino-foreign cultural exchanges. However,most of the previous researches about poem translation are mainly from perspectivessuch as Functional Translation Theory, Reception Aesthetic Theory, Translator’sSubjectivity, Pragmatics, etc. Few scholars have studied the logical relationship inthe Tang Poem translation from the perspective of Logical Metafunction. XuYuanchong, whose translation works receive great popularity with readers both athome and abroad, is an outstanding translator among them. Therefore, this thesisdecides to study the logical metalfunctions of his translation work from theperspective of Logical Metafunction. The research has chosen English versions of40Tang Poems from Xu Yuanchong’s translation work ‘Three Hundred of TangPoems’(2007).Logical Metafunction, as one important part of Systemic Functional Grammar,refers that Language has the function of reflecting the relationship between two ormore language units. This research studies the function from two angles, namely,Interdenpency and Logical-Semantic Relation. Interdependency means whether twoclauses are equal in status or one clause controls/depends on the other.Logic-semantic relation aims to study whether the meaning of one clause is expandedor projected by another. Under the instruction of Logical Metafunction and from theperspective of Interdependency and Logical-Semantic Relation, this thesis adoptsqualitative analysis and quantitative statistics to discuss Mr. Xu’s translation skills todeal with the logical metafunctionsThe research findings are as follows: Firstly, all the logical metafunctions inoriginal text appear in Xu Yuanchong’s translation version, including parataxis&hypotaxis under Interdependency and expansion&projectioan under Logical-Semantic Relation. Secondly, Mr. Xu adopts two translation skills: one is tomake the implicit logical metafunctions in originally text explicit through addingconjunctions; another one is to be consistent with the original text when they haveexplicit logical metafunctions or when they are just a bunch of sceneries.The significance of this thesis lies in two aspects. Firstly, the combination oflogical metafunction, a linguistic theory, with the poem translation enriches thethematic angles to study classical poem translation to some extend. Secondly, thisthesis discusses Xu Yuanchong’s skills to translate logical metafunctions in TangPoems, which deepens our cognition about him and may have some enlightenment forother poem translators. The limitation of this thesis is that the size of data is still notsufficient enough and that it may have some subjectivity when analyzing the text.To enhance the reliability, further studies can base on larger size of data and moreobjective analysis.