A Contrastive Metafunctional Study Of Chinese And English Tourist Texts

With the economic globalization,tourism industry has developed rapidly and more foreigners have visited China.As a window to foreign publicity,Chinese tourist text's translation has drawn many translators' dramatic attention.However,up to now,as for tourist text's translation,most previous studies are from the perspectives of functional equivalence theory,cross-culture,ecology or only one of three metafunctions in Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).Few studies adopt three metafunctions:ideational metafunction,interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction as a whole theoretical framework to analyze tourist text's translation.Therefore,the dissertation adopts a SFL's approach to make a contrastive analysis of introductions to Xanadu in Chinese and English on the basis of the achievements of three metafunctions.The dissertation,based on Halliday's SFL,conducts a contrastive study of the source text(ST)and the target text(TT)in terms of Transitivity,Voice,Mood,Modality,Markedness of Theme and Thematic Progression.Through the study,it can be found that there are many similarities from the realizations of three metafunctions,which guarantee the preservation of realizations of three metafunctions of ST in translation.However,owing to Chinese and English differences with reference to linguistic form and idiomatic expression,there are also many differences from the realizations of three metafunctions.Therefore,it is suggested that the translator make some appropriate adjustments to ensure the achievement of three metafunctions in translating,including deduction and transformation of the processes in Transitivity,change of Voices,proper selection of Pronoun,unmarked Theme and marked Theme and consolidation of loose clauses into Subject-predicate clause.It is feasible and rewarding to make a contrastive study of Chinese and English tourist texts from the perspectives of three metafunctions of SFL.It is hoped that the present study will provide some implications for tourist text's translation and help to survey and deal with some issues in translation.