A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of Wuthering Heights And Its Chinese Translation By Yang Yi

Emily Bront?'s Wuthering Heights,in spite of its disesteem at the beginning of publication,has been regarded as one of the most prominent literary works in the world.Many Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights have been published.Among them,Yang Yi's translated text is known as the most acceptable one and is considered a milestone in the history of literary translation.Consequently,this translation has aroused the studies of many scholars with remarkable achievements.However,most studies are not systemic enough in perspectives and contents.Oriented to the present situation of literary translation practice and the problems in the literary transition studies,therefore,the present thesis attempts to make a comparative discourse analysis of Wuthering Heights and its Chinese translation by Yang Yi on the semantic,stylistic and contextual levels in the light of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics,van Dijk's Discourse Analysis,Catford's Translation Shift Theory and other related theories.The comparison of the two texts on the semantic level is made in terms of their macro-semantic structures,including the coherence of their character depictions and plots,and in terms of the micro-semantic structures,including the meaning structures of their sentences,phrases and words.Results of the comparison demonstrate:(1)The two texts are equivalent in their macro-semantic structures such as their coherence,character descriptions and plots,which suggests that Yang Yi gets into the protagonists' hearts to understand their thoughts and reproduces the characters and plot with excellent Chinese writing skills analogous to Emily Bront?'s English writing skills.(2)The two texts are partly different in their micro-semantic structures at the levels of sentence,phrase and word,which means that,while Emily Bront? follows a thought pattern of logic and reason,Yang Yi adopts a thought pattern of intuition and insight.The comparison of the two texts on the stylistic level is made in terms of their macro-stylistic features,including their textual structures and uses of cohesive devices such as reference and substitution above the sentence level,and in terms of their micro-stylistic features,including their syntactic,lexical and rhetorical features.Results of the study reveal:(1)The two texts are similar in their macro-stylistic features,which means that Yang Yi follows the overall stylistic patterns of the original novel above the sentence level.(2)The two texts are partly different in their micro-stylistic features,e.g.,in the cohesive ties and rhetorical devices of metaphor,simile and irony at or below the sentence level,which suggests that Yang Yi is more flexible in the transformation of micro-stylistic features,often substituting parataxis for hypotaxis through the choice of different words,translation shifts,omission and supplementary translation.The comparison of the two texts on the contextual level is made in terms of the contextual factors such as their overall economic,political and social settings,their author's or translator's backgrounds of education and life,and the characteristics of their readers.Results of the research show that the two texts are considerably different in their contextual factors.This suggests that Yang Yi's translation,which is similar to the original novel in macrostructures but partly different from the original in its microstructures,is a compromise between Yang Yi's effort to introduce the essentials of English literature faithfully and her intention to adapt foreign language arts to the Chinese culture and Chinese readers.Hopefully,this study may be meaningful both practically and academically.It may help to promote the translation of Wuthering Heights in particular and literary translation in general by providing insights regarding successful translations.It may also help to enrich the study of the translation of Wuthering Heights and other literary translations by providing some preliminary findings and by attracting the attention from more scholars to the field of literary translation.