A Systemic Functional Approach To The Translation Of The Nominal Group In The Report On The Work Of The Government (2016)

Systemic Functional Linguistics was developed originally by M.A.K.Halliday in the late 1950s and early 1960s.It is a major discipline in the field of Linguistics,extensively applied in language teaching,discourse analysis and translation studies.As for the translation of nominal group,previous studies mostly focused on order difference and translation of modifiers in a sentence based on traditional grammar.Previous studies focused on discourse as a major approach and analyzed the differences and translation of subject-predicate structure,verb phrase,prepositional phrase and the attributive clause in Chinese and English.Scholars put forward such translation methods as rearranging word order,adding the subject,breaking long sentences and combining short ones.As for the application of functional grammar to translation,discourse analysis was widely used in translation studies,from the three metafunctions—ideational,interpersonal and textual.Some scholars discussed Theme/Rheme and New/Old Information.In conclusion,previous studies focused on order differences between Chinese and English,based on traditional grammar or Halliday's three metafunctions,from a macro perspective.They did not study the important language unit—the nominal group specifically and independently.This thesis applies a contrastive analysis method,qualitative analysis method and case study method to investigate the characteristics of translation of the nominal group between Chinese and English based on the Report on the Work of the Government(2016).The discussion of experiential and logical structures will be clearly represented in tables,aiming to analyze experiential and logical structures of the nominal group from the functional perspective,and by doing so,to give a better understanding of the structure of the nominal group,which has an important role in the language system,in an attempt to contribute to the translation of the nominal group as well as the discourse.Most nominal groups need to be translated by keeping the functional elements in the same position but the order of the functional elements should be considered differently when more modifiers exist in the same category.Premodifiers are important structural elements and means of indicating meaning so it is helpful to correctly understand the nature of the language if the relation of Premodifiers and Head is clear.The ordering of Premodifiers in Chinese and English follows one core rule:restrictive modifiers occur before descriptive modifiers.In a Chinese nominal group,there exists more complicated situation.The modifiers with coordinating relation and progressive relation must be discussed separately.In the English nominal group,the order of adjectives is largely determined by the semantic properties of the adjectives.It follows one of the most basic strategies of human cognitive processing:dealing with simple information and the information easy to process first,and then handling complex and difficult ones.Through analyzing the structure of the nominal group,people will have a deeper understanding of every element in a nominal group.The reason why order difference between Chinese and English exists will be discussed from cognitive perspective,that is,the amount of information to influence the order of modifiers.The results will have a positive guidance of the research and translation of Chinese and English.