| According to functional linguist Halliday, theme is the ’point of depature’ of a clause while rheme is the remainder of that clause. Theme-rheme progression (TRP) plays an important role in the writing and translating of news articles, a genre which involves frequent use of referential cohesive links. Two types of news, namely report and commentary, have received scholarly attention in relation to how TRP patterns are distributed in their writing. By contrast, news translation has received little attention in this regard, especially news reports. The present study sets out to explore TRP patterns in English-Chinese translation of financial news reports, with a purpose to find out how in this genre Chinese translations conform to or deviate from English originals and to what extent their differences might have been caused by language-specific preferences. To answer these questions, a corpus-based method is adopted. The corpus under scrutiny consists of three parts:English source text (ST), Chinese target text (TT), and Chinese comparable text (CT), all of which contain texts collected from English and Chinese newspapers on the topic of Chinese economy. Using the Danesian categorization of TRP patterns and its modifications, the corpus is annotated in relation to 16 patterns, whose occurrences and frequencies are analyzed quantitatively. The analyses suggest that even if TTs are slightly closer to CTs than to STs, the way Chinese translations deviate from their English originals is not necessarily a result of conforming to target language norms. Statistics shows that whether language-specific preference is sufficient in explaining the difference between ST and TT depends on the complexity of the pattern in concern. While it is clearly visible in simple patterns, it is not so in complex patterns. |
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