A Contrastive Study Of Four English Versions Of Yueyang Pavilion From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression

In translation,the target text should be faithful to the source text.The English translation of classical Chinese literature has always been the focus of attention in the translation circle.In classical Chinese prose,writers often use short and simple sentences to express their thoughts.To improve the readability of the target text,the translator should on the one hand,reveal the hidden internal connection between separated clauses and on the other hand,try to keep the source text concise and elegant.For this reason,in the process of translating classical Chinese prose into English,the translator should convey the overall information of the source text to the target audience rather than get entangled into mechanical matches between words and phrases.Systemic Functional Linguistics,as an applicable linguistics,is of certain guidance to translation.Subsumed under textual metafunction,its theory of Thematic Progression(hereafter TP)has been widely applied to different fields of language study.However,studies on the application of TP to the study of English translations of the classical Chinese prose Yueyang Pavilion are still few and far between.Against this backdrop,this paper takes as a corpus the classical Chinese prose Yueyang Pavilion written by Fan Zhongyan,a famous Chinese writer in the Song dynasty,and its four English translations to contrastively analyze their TP patterns so as to reveal their similarities and differences in TP patterns and check the validity of the assumption that a good translation must be identical to the original text in terms of TP patterns.Hopefully,this study will provide some reference to as well as shed some light on the translation of classical Chinese prose into English.Based on a contrastive analysis of the source text and its four English versions in terms of TP patterns,we have made major findings as follows:First,in terms of TP patterns,the English translations are unexceptionally influenced by the source text.Since the coordinate Theme pattern was not used in the source text,it was only occasionally adopted by Yang and Yangs' translation.Second,despite this,none of these English translations follow the TP patterns of the source text mechanically.Among them,Luo's translation is the most consistent with the source text in TP patterns;Xie's and Pan's translations are only partly consistent with the source text,ranking first and second respectively in their consistency with the first paragraph in TP patterns;and Yang and Yang's translation deviates strikingly from the source text in that the TP patterns in the third and fourth paragraphs are totally different from those in the source text.Third,due to the differences between English and Chinese with English being a hypotactic language and Chinese being a paratactic one,the consistency between the source text and the target text in TP patterns cannot be adopted as a sole absolute criterion to evaluate the faithfulness of the target text to the source text.Instead,it can only be taken as one parameter in this evaluation.