Theme-Rheme Progression Patterns In English-Chinese Translation Practice

Theme-rheme progression pattern is one of the elements in discourse that is worth exploring in translation studies.Based on the translation practice of the excerpted first five chapters of Health,Illness,and Culture: Broken Narratives,the present author of the thesis aims at exploring how to deal with the theme-rheme progression patterns in English when they are translated into Chinese.Based on Hallidayan concept of theme-rheme,Chinese scholars classify the theme-rheme progression pattern into several different patterns.The present author tries to figure out how helpful it is to analyze the patterns and what strategies can be used in translating English into Chinese with examples from the first five chapters of Health,Illness,and Culture: Broken Narratives.It is concluded that the flow of information of English may not follow the same patterns as Chinese since they belong to different language families.Therefore in translating the source text into the target text,theme-rheme progression patterns should be analyzed in detail and orders of theme and rheme should be changed to follow the practice of Chinese.Consequently,theme-rheme progression patterns are not only very helpful in decomposing the source text,but also in constructing the textual meaning of the target text.