Thematic Choice And Its Impact On Translated Texts

Linguistics has been applied in translation studies to provide solutions for translation practice.This research is also to analyze the application of Theme-Rheme theory in practical translation.It describes the common issues rising in translation due to linguistic discrepancies and then explores two systems in textual metafunction established by Halliday,the thematic and information systems.Eventually,it investigates the thematic choices made in translated texts on clausal and textual levels.The clausal samples here include literature and non-literary sentences while the passage samples range across many subjects,most of which are informative texts.English and Chinese differ in Theme-Rheme features,information structure and cohesive means due to unique syntactic characteristics the two languages have.The differences may lead to shifts in thematic choices in translation,which may make it hard to achieve textual equivalence and impact the rhetorical and cohesive effect of the original texts.With this in mind,two questions are put forward in this study: What's the difference between English and Chinese with respect to the thematic structure and information structure and what effect may the possible thematic shifts have on the meaning of the sentence and on the overall meaning of the text? Analysis of collected text samples provides answers to the above questions.The findings in this paper are useful for future research in functional translation theory,advocating that equivalence on clausal and textual levels is significant to produce a good translation and translators should be conscious of using thematic analysis to create cohesive texts.