A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Classical Chinese Poetry Translation

As a brilliant and outstanding ci-poetess, Li Qingzhao, whose works have been wildly accepted with remarkable artistry value, wins a high reputation in the history of Chinese literature and plays an important role in classic Chinese poetry. The studies of the English translation of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems have been attached great importance to, while the research scope centers upon translation history and the translation strategies from different perspectives, few contrastive researches on the translation of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems and its source text from the perspective of linguistics, especially of grammatical metaphor. Hence this thesis sets out to contrastively analyze the Chinese version and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s 8ci-poems from the perspective of Grammatical Metaphor Theory, which indicates the differences and similarities between the Chinese version and the English version in three sub-types of grammatical metaphor.Grammatical metaphor, as a phenomenon arising from the interaction of semantics and lexico-grammar, occurs in the expression of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in systemic functional linguistics. Located within the framework of the theory of grammatical metaphor, the thesis selects the Chinese version interpreted by the famous scholar Chen Zumei and the English version translated by Xu Yuanchong respectively as the objects of study to probe into the differences and similarities of the three sub-types of grammatical metaphor between the Chinese version and the English version via qualitative analysis. Besides, the contrastive approach is also applied to this thesis to analyze the differences and similarities of certain typical translation and the source text from the perspective of grammatical metaphor, so as to provide a broader perspective and reference for the studies of the translation of classical Chinese poetry. The research questions are peered out which include the differences and similarities illustrated by a contrastive analysis of grammatical metaphor between the Chinese version and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s 8 ci-poems and the reasons for the above differences and similarities.Through the research, the major findings can be generated: 1) As for ideational grammatical metaphor, similar percentage of nominalization is shared both in theChinese and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems. Adjectivization and the type of ideational GM irrelevant to any rank-shift are more widely used in the English version translated by Xu Yuanchong. But common words used as verbs are more frequent in the Chinese version—the source text. 2) The main distribution of mood metaphors in the source text shares approximate percentage with that in the English translation. However, modality metaphors are not frequently used in both the Chinese version and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems adopted. 3) The type of prepositional phrases as themes shares similar percentage in Chinese and English versions. Noun phrases(as object) as themes are more frequently used in the source text; time adverbials as themes are more densely distributed in Chinese; a non-finite verb phrase as the theme is unique in the English version. 4) With regard to the similarities and differences between a contrastive analysis of the Chinese version and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems, the major causes are attributed to four aspects: thought pattern, lyric image, unique language features of ci-poems and the need for the cohesion.In conclusion, the overall thesis indicates an attempt at contrastively analyzing the instances of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings between the Chinese version and the English version of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems from the perspective of grammatical metaphor theory within the framework of systemic functional linguistics,which provides a new theoretical perspective for the researches on the translation of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poetry; and this thesis expands the scope of the application of grammatical metaphor theory in the aspect of exploring Chinese and English languages from the grammatical metaphor perspective.