Thematic Characteristics In Crosstalk And Its Translation

As one of the traditional vocal art forms with Chinese characteristics,crosstalk is well-known for its comedic form of making puns and allusions and has been prevailing in Chinese civil society since its birth in Ming and Qing dynasties;with the process of globalization accelerates nowadays,crosstalk,as one of the most representative performing arts of China,is also gradually accepted and enjoyed by an increasing number of foreign audience,which makes translating the crosstalk subtitles a must for promoting the spread of traditional Chinese culture.Currently there are few researches on crosstalk translation in academia and most of them are carried out based on the theoretical frameworks of pragmatics or cognitional linguistics,let alone much fewer literatures are focused on the crosstalk translation studies according to the thematic theory of systemic functional linguistics.Guided by the thematic theory,the author makes a multidimensional research on the basis of the crosstalk with bilingual subtitles from the television program "China Showbiz" broadcasted in CCTV-4,aiming to prove the feasibility of the Theme-Rheme system functioning as a parameter to measure the achievement of translation equivalence in the crosstalk.The author firstly adopts the quantitative method to analyze the distribution of thematic structures and thematic progression patterns of crosstalk and its English translation,and then further investigates the equivalence of thematic choices,recapitulating the causes of nonequivalence occurring in both crosstalk and its translation;secondly,from the perspective of the multiple text types,the author takes the qualitative method to accumulate the previous researches on translation studies based on the thematic theory and then makes a comparison of the crosstalk with other types of texts and summarizes the dissimilarities and similarities of thematic choices and thematic equivalence among them.Through the survey,the author finds that the Simple Theme takes dominant position in both crosstalk and its translation and both the pattern of Same Theme and the pattern of Continuous Model account for majority of all presented thematic progression patterns in the corpus;there is a general equivalence in both thematic structures and thematic progression patterns and the causes of the occurring nonequivalence of thematic choices mainly lie in 4"the preposition of WH-word or group","the transformation of existential sentences" as well as "the transformation of active and passive voices".Moreover,in order to further summarize the potential rules of thematic choice and thematic equivalence in different types of texts,the author makes comparison of crosstalk and other types of texts and then notes that it is similarly the Simple Theme that holds predominance in most types of texts while in the type of text like television interview where some special constituents(e.g.interpersonal and textual elements)should be added to maintain the coherence of the impromptu dialogue,the Multiple Theme occupies majority;and such types of texts like the manual of civil aviation where a large number of adverbial clauses of condition are put in the starting point of a sentence,it is the Clause as Theme that takes dominant position in the whole text.In the respect of thematic progression patterns,all types of texts that the author has exemplified including the text of crosstalk generally follow the equivalent thematic structures and thematic progression patterns in both their original and target texts.Such conclusions not only prove the feasibility of the Theme-Rheme system functioning as a parameter to measure the achievement of translation equivalence in the crosstalk,but also provide reference for the further comparison of different text types based on thematic theory in the future.