The Functional Discourse Analysis Of The English And Chinese Translations Of Patrick Modiano’s Rue Des Boutiques Obscures

Discourse Analysis enjoys a history of more than six decades and the approaches to DA and their corresponding theories adopted by different researchers vary. Functional Discourse Analysis is based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and strives to interpret and explain the context of culture, context of situation and language of discourses. On language level, the three metafunctions, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual, which cover other sub-systems on different levels of language, are the nuclei of interpreting the meanings of discourses. The evaluation of whether the translations express the original meanings correctly and appropriately inevitably involves comparing the source texts with the target texts, but the comparison under no theoretical guidance is too subjective to apply its results to other researches due to their differential standards of approaches. Therefore this thesis aims at comparing Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures and its English and Chinese translations and inspecting systemically and objectively whether the translated meanings are equivalent with the original meanings within the scope of the three metafunctions by adopting FDA approach.This thesis mainly analyses the excerpts on clausal level, including narratives, depictions and dialogues, covering most of the chapters. Forty cases are carefully selected and classified into three categories of metafunctions and twenty sub-categories. Through the analyses of French, English and Chinese discourses, the common transformation between original texts and target texts is well observed. Within the scope of ideational metafunction, Processes of different types can be mutually transformed or be shifted to other sub-types when translating; Circumstantial elements can be translated as a Process conditionally; Agent and Medium can serve as different roles due to the specific Process in different languages; ideational metaphors can be either reproduced or reinstated or created in translations. Within the scope of interpersonal metafunction, the sequences of Subjects and Finite operators in the translations play the major role in making the mood consistent with that of the source texts; mood can be realized not only by Finite operators but also by mood Adjuncts which can sometimes even realize the function of the former ones; Polarity can either be realized by negative adverbs explicitly or by verbs with negative meaning implicitly; the Complement in a French clause, which is sometimes preposed inside the Mood element and has the potential to be transformed into Subject, still belongs to Residue element; interpersonal metaphors, usually in interrogative questions, can be translated in different ways and the corresponding Finite operators in their responses also bear distinctive meanings. Within the scope of textual metafunction, Theme and Rheme are partly or as a whole interchangeable, which will inevitably create distinctions; the elements in a multiple Theme have the potential to be transposed to Rheme or to occur in the new thematic structures, and vice versa; within the four major cohesive devices in translating, conjunction can be substituted with other relevant types of conjunctives, a reference chain can be preserved to realize personal references or comparative references, determiners, copular verbs and conjunctives which are mostly ellipsed by Modiano, can be preserved to realize ellipsis, and hyponyms and meronyms can be reproduced to realize lexical cohesion.The significance of the research manifests itself mainly in two aspects:one is to provide some experience or strategies for translating Modiano’s fictions based on the analysis of Rue des Boutiques Obscures and its two translation versions, meanwhile, the thesis also serves as a textual interpretation of this fiction; the other is to prove the efficaciousness and appropriateness of applying FDA to the contrastive study of multilingual texts, providing new approaches and perspectives for the further studies of Modiano’s fictions and translations.