A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Tourist Texts And Their Translations Based On The Thematic Progression Theory

With the rise and development of text linguistics, more scholars apply relevant text analysis theories in the study of textual translation. As the cohesion and coherence is the core of textual analysis, the thematic progression theory is an effective method to analyze textual cohesion and coherence.The thematic progression theory is helpful for translators to grasp the writers’ purpose and rend more coherent and fluent target language more faithful to the original meaning on the whole.The previous studies have focused on discussing the relation of thematic progression and textual coherence from the perspective of a single text, or the relation of different genres of texts and the choice of different thematic progression patterns, and the difference of the thematic progression in the same type of text. However, linguists mainly find out common features of one text in studying the thematic progression in the same text. In this thesis, the author not only analyzed the similarities and differences of the thematic progression pattern in both Chinese and English tourist texts, but also analyzed whether the translation is consistent with the standard of source texts through the comparison of Chinese and English text in the thematic progression patterns, displaying the thematic progression patterns are helpful for the accurate translation in the similar tourist text.The corpus for this study is selected from formal publications or official websites, including 15 bilingual(Chinese-English) texts and 15 English tourist texts. All the scenic sports are familiar with us. In light of previous studies and features of this corpus, the current study summarizes 5 thematic progression patterns: constant, focused, linear, alternative and combined. The present study is designed to investigate the similarities and differences between English and Chinese texts in the configuration of the above five patterns. The results show that:Firstly, there basically exists a common trend in writers’ selection of TP patterns in tourist texts both at home and aboard. They both employ multiple TP patterns in producing a text, among which the constant pattern, the focused pattern, the linear pattern occur more frequently, especially the constant pattern. Such a similarity in choosing TP patterns stems from the common recognition of the organization features of tourist texts. However, the combine pattern is barely used in both texts.Secondly, apart from similarities, there also exist some differences between Chinese and English tourist texts in terms of TP patterns, in that the latter tends to employ more diverse TP patterns than the former. The focused pattern is preferable in the Chinese political text, but not so welcome in English texts, which would otherwise prefer to the linear patterns.Thirdly, the English version of Chinese tourism texts is almost similar to the original English text in the selection of thematic progression patterns, which shows translators prefer to select the progression patterns of the translated text. Based on the study data and combined the cohesion and coherence standard, purpose standard, acceptability standard and informativity standard, the author made a study of the quality of translation. According to this study, this paper find out that being an important structure in textual development, the thematic progression pattern is of vital importance to translation in that it enables translators to approach the ideal translation standards closely.This study is of great practice value for tourist translation. It can not only enrich textual genres and provide corpus statistics in studying the thematic progression, but also help translators thoroughly understand the internal structure of Chinese and English tourist text.