Evaluation Of China’s University Profile Texts Translated In English From The Perspectives Of Metafunctions And Genre Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Under the influence of the increasingly frequent of the cultural exchanges between Chinese and western, many universities begin to strengthen their external publicity and establish their English websites, in order to strive for international exchanges and cooperation and at the same time attract foreign students and scholars. University profile is a convenient window through which readers can understand Chinese universities. And the translation quality directly affects the choices of foreign students and scholars.At present, the C-E translation research of UPs mainly concentrates on these perspectives, namely the pure translation theories, cultural communication and discourse analysis. Nonetheless, the research from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics is less. And in this regard, most articles only applied a single theory of SFL, such as the evaluation theory,interpersonal theory or genre theory. Therefore, in this thesis, the author will apply two perspectives of SFL, that is, the three metafunctions and genre, to conduct a research on the C-E translation of UPs and make a comparative analysis on similarities and differences in the ST and TT, and finally try to evaluate briefly the quality of the translation.This dissertation consists of randomly 20 pieces of Chinese UPs and their corresponding translated UPs to constitute the present corpus from the websites of Chinese university profiles. Through the study, the author found that in terms of ideational function, the percentages of the transitivity processtypes in the ST and TT are similar and thus ST and TT reach functional equivalence. In terms of the interpersonal function, the proportions of the mood system in the ST and TT are similar; in mood structure, the indicative moods are of the biggest percentages in both ST and TT; in subject, the third person is used most frequently in the ST and TT; in addition, in tense, because the tenses of English and Chinese are different and thus the comparison on the tenses of ST and TT was omitted. Therefore, in general, the mood system of the ST and TT are equivalent. But the proportions of the modal value in the ST and TT have a great difference, and hence the modality of the ST and TT are not equivalent. In terms of textual function, the theme structures of the ST and TT show similar percentages. The participant themes are of the majority in the ST and TT, while the circumstance themes are of the minority, and thus it is justifiable to assume that the theme structures in the ST and TT are equivalent,while in terms of cohesive devices, the difference between the ST and TT is striking, with ellipsis being the most-frequently used in the ST but reference the one with the biggest proportion in the TT, mainly due to the different conventions of language in English and Chinese. In addition, in terms of generic structure, the genres of the ST and TT are also not equivalent.This dissertation used a combined method of quantitative and qualitative analysis and summarized the features of three metafunctions and genres in the CUPs(STs) and TUPs(TTs) to make a comparative analysis. To a certain degree, this study can not only enrich the application of Systemic FunctionalLinguistics in translation, but also provide useful reference for the future studies of C-E translation of the university profiles.