Study On The Translation Of Three Syntactic Features In Su Shi’s Descriptive Prose

This essay chooses seven famous proses from Su Shi’s descriptive proses and their English translations as the main materials, and is based on the theory of Functional Stylistics. The writer concludes three kinds of special sentences from the seven descriptive proses. They are interrogative sentence, several-verb sentence and parallel sentence.The first chapter is about interrogative sentence. We analyze the communicative function of question sentence from two aspects, how it sets suspicion and how it introspect the life. The tone of interrogative sentence is quite different from other sentence’s tone, so it is very important to notice this special sentence and translate it. Besides, interrogative sentences are mostly used in the dialogues, so translators can insert some other elements like appellation and hyphen to cut a long sentence into short parts and make the sentence more colloquial.The second chapter studies about the translation of several-verb sentence from the aspect of logical function. By analyzing, we can find that the translators chose to change the original text’s form and rearrange the sequence of words. Because of the difference of the two languages, it is hard to find the corresponding form in English. But we think it maybe a good way to absorb Chinese expressive form to develop a new form in English.The third chapter shows that parallel sentence is an effective form to build a sense of space and express feelings implicitly, and also a good form to show one’s opinions logically. We divide it into unmarked theme and marked theme from the aspect of textual function. By the comparison of several translations, we point out that many translators give enough attention to this form, but when it comes to some complicated sentences and Chinese cultural words, the translators will abandon the original form to adapt to the target language.The final part is conclusion. It concludes what we should learn and notice from the translators’translations. The thesis asserted that translators of literary works should strive to faithfully preserve the essence of the original work, and represent those meaningful forms to be responsible to the original writer and the target language readers. At last, this thesis points out its contribution to the translation of Su Shi’s prose and its limitations in collecting and researching to provide a orientation of the future studies.