A Study On The Yangs’ Translation Of The Border Town From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Biancheng, the masterpiece of Shen Congwen, is known as “the purest novel text in the history of modern literature” and “a peak work of pastoral legends in Chinese modern literature ”. The translated versions in 13 languages are produced in more than 40 countries. At present, the English version translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang(the Yangs in this thesis) and the one by Jefferey C. Kinkley attract the dominant attention All in all the four English versions. In 2009, Yi Lin Publishing House published a bilingual version The Border Town by the Yangs that is faithful to the original and is of significance in transmitting Chinese culture. The previous studies on The Border Town at home and abroad were mainly conducted either from the perspective of translation aesthetic or from the perspective of translator’s subjectivity and from the perspective of functional equivalence, but register theory is never involved.Originated in contextualism and put forward by the London School, register theory is one of the important contents in Halliday’s functional thought. Halliday believes that register is composed of three variables, that is, field, tenor and mode. Field refers to the activities the participants take part in; tenor refers to the social role of the participants and the relationship between them; mode refers to the communication channels and media. This thesis is intended to evaluate the translated version The Border Town from the three variables in order to find whether it reproduces the original character image and writing style by reproducing the register markers at the phonological level, the lexical level, the syntaxical level and the paragraphic level.In this thesis, the translation of the descriptive discourse is analyzed from field which tells us the time, the place, the surrounding environment, the characters and the events in the novel, namely, the main factors for a novel to confirm it reproduces the plot of the novel. And the translation of dialogues from tenor shows the relationship between the characters in terms of status, contact and affect, which reproduces the character image. In addition, the translation reproduces the distinctive writing style of Shen Congwen who describes Xiangxi in a local color. It is evident that the application of register theory in literary translation is of significance in reproducing the original character image and writing style. And the author makes the tentative study on The Border Town by the Yangs in attempt to give some guidance to the literary translators that they should have a comprehensive mastery of three variables-field, tenor and mode, then identify the original register and reproduce the same register in the translated version while translating.