On The Translation Criterion Of Faithfulness From ThePerspective Of Transitivity

Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG)(Halliday 1985)holds that any human language has three meta-functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.As one of them,ideational function enables people to build a mental picture of reality and to understand what goes on around them and inside them.Ideational function consists of experiential function and logical function.Experiential function is achieved by transitivity.Transitivity is very important.It is the direct contact between language and the real world.Transitivity enables language to manifest human beings' social and psychological experiences by indicating process,participant and circumstantial element.The goal of transitivity analysis is to “analyze the ideational function of a text and to find out the main content of the text by analyzing the types of process and participant”(Hu Zhuanglin 1989).Since Halliday(1971)employed transitivity to analyze The Inheritors,a novel by W.Golding,transitivity has been widely utilized by scholars.(Short 1976;Kennedy 1982;Zhu Shichang 1995;Shen Dan 2006).Huang Guowen(2002,2003)applied transitivity to analyze translations of Chinese classics and ancient poetry for the first time successfully.Translation criterion has been a very important topic in translation theory as well as the focus of the academic circle for a long time.Among many classic theories about the translation criterion in Chinese and western history of translation theory,the criterion of faithfulness has always dominated the other criteria.Many famous translators' theory attached importance to the criterion of faithfulness to some degree.However,the criterion of faithfulness has its own limitations.Many researches on the criterion of faithfulness are conducted from the perspective of meaning,form correspondence,textual equivalence and functional equivalence and these perspectives lack a reference factor of quantitative analysis for the translation criterion of faithfulness,which made the translation criterion of faithfulness less scientific and less reliable.The present study applies transitivity system of SFG to make a quantitative contrast analysis of the transitivity distribution of the three English versions of Song of Mu-Lan to put forward an evaluation method for the translation criterion of faithfulness.The present study aims to make the translation criterion of faithfulness more scientific and reliable.Song of Mu-Lan is a very famous ballad in the Southern and Northern Dynasties of Chinese history.It is highly praised as one of the two summits of Yuefu Poetry and the other one is a ballad named An Old Poem Composed for the Wife of Jiao Zhongqing.Based on the transitivity analysis of the ballad and its three English versions(Charles Budd 1912,Arthur Waley 1946,Xu Yuanchong 1996),data statistics and data analysis,the present thesis tries to judge which of the three versions is the most faithful to the source text from the perspective of transitivity.It is the first time to use transitivity as a reference factor of quantitative analysis for the criterion of faithfulness.The main findings of the present study are as follows:Firstly,it manifests that how different process patterns,as construed by transitivity system,model experience in the poems.Material process helps the author narrate the story,promotes the development of the plot of the story,depicts what Mu-Lan has done for her country and indicates that Mu-Lan is very brave,patriotic and filial.Mental process helps the author to describe Mu-Lan's worry about her father in the beginning and her miss about her parents during the period of going to battlefield.Relational process reveals the reason why Mu-Lan should take his father's place to fight in the war and why Mu-Lan can disguise herself as a man so successfully.Verbal process reveals people's focus and promotes the development of plot of the poem.Secondly,by analyzing the transitivity systems of the source text and the three target texts,the target text which best restores the transitivity system of the source text and is the most faithful to the source text from the perspective of transitivity will can be found.The present thesis applies qualitative method,quantitative method and contrastive method to analyze and compares the transitivity system of the source text and its three English versions and judge which version is the most faithful to the source text from the perspective of transitivity.Finally,we arrive at a conclusion that Xu Yuanchong's version best restores the transitivity system of the source text and is the most faithful to the source text from the perspective of transitivity.Thirdly,the present thesis confirms the applicability of using transitivity as a reference factor for the translation criterion of faithfulness and its enlightenment to the research on the translation criterion of faithfulness.