Report On The Translation Of Progressivism

This report is based on my translation of Walter Nugent’s Progressivism published in 2009. The theory applied to my practice of translation is Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. In the Hallidayan framework, a clause as message consists of theme and rheme, and thematic structure and information structure are closely related. Accordingly, the translation report explores the arrangement of the theme-rheme structure and the information focus in the practice of translation, which falls into three categories: marked focus in translation, marked theme in translation, and the unmarked theme and unmarked focus in translation. The analysis of thematic structure can help the translator comprehend the logic in the original text, namely, why the author chose to arrange the information in this way, and thus in translation, the information flow of the original text can be maintained by keeping the theme-rheme structure unchanged in the target language. But the information focus in the information structure is also worth noticing, and sometimes we can even sacrifice the theme-rheme structure of the original text to ensure that the most important information is highlighted in the target text because the theme-rheme structure is the way in which the author manipulates the structure of his message and highlights the focus.