Application Of Transitivity Theory On Analysis And Translation Of Fairy Tales

This thesis is a tentative study of Halliday’s transitivity in English and Chinese applied in English-Chinese translation practice. Halliday’s systematic functional linguistics has extensively been applied to the analysis of various text types. Within this framework, some scholars have provided comprehensive insights into the translation of poems, advertisements and novels. In the literature by now, few studies have been done in Chinese versions of English fairy stories. Systematic-functional grammar is universally recognizable in stylistic study because this grammar conducts systematic and profound study on the language and the environment involved. Halliday himself claims that all languages reflect universal meta-functions in the language and three meta-functions are proposed:ideational, interpersonal and textual. This thesis attempts to analyze the principles relevant to the transitivity and representations of the transitivity in English and in Chinese.The Systemic-Functional Grammar proposed by M. A. K. Halliday, has up to now been universally applied to text analysis. And this study is also designed to recognize the features of transitivity in English-Chinese translation and the application of transitivity in translation. The analysis of the translation from the transitivity perspective offers a new insight into the translation activity. Although this study is based on transitional analysis, the application might be instructive to other researches involved.The author intends to answer these questions:What are the characteristics of English fairy tales and their Chinese versions from the transitivity view? What are the reasons of the shifting of the processes of transitivity? Through the statistic of the transitivity and analysis of the texts, this study aims to find out that; English fairy tales and the Chinese versions show more similarities than differences; material and relational and mental processes comprise the majority of the process; other types include behavioral, verbal and existential processes; among the six process types, material process are the most. The second discovery is that most of the processes stay the same in the process of translating; among those changed processes they are mainly the material and relational processes; for material processes, they mainly shift into relational ones. One reason for the shift is because of the rearrangement of the grammatical structures; sometimes the application of figures of speech can cause the shift of process.Above all, the deviations from transitivity perspective in the translation are illustrated too. And in spite of this all the Chinese versions can mostly capture the conceptual meaning which is realized by transitivity, and under these circumstances the shifting of process types or process components are not given too much attention. The present thesis is useful because with a detailed analysis of the story sample, the thesis aims to provide a new and objective framework to describe their prominent features of English fairy tales and its Chinese versions from the perspective of transitivity, and the analysis of underlying reasons for the change of transitivity and the influence to the translations are of great help. Firstly, the results will offer more about the ideational features of the two languages. Second, the comparison of the features of ideational meaning between the English tales and the Chinese versions can give learners a good implication for the process of fairy tales translations from English to Chinese. Besides, when it comes to the translations, the shortcomings and suggestions of the method can be come up with.This thesis, first of all, carries out studies on the transitivity theory and its implications on the source and target language. Then, it classifies the different types of transitivity in the source and target texts, and the paper tries to find out the principles and reasons for these shifts. The shifts in transitivity bring about changes in the focus of the texts, and some also lead to the imbalance of information. These translational phenomena are to realize equivalence in translation, in order to make the translation practice more scientific.