| With the progressing of globalization and modern technology,the requirement of high quality translations is becoming increasingly demanding.High quality translation accelerates the progress of human civilization in that it can not only free the talents in various professional areas from tough language comprehension and concentrate on their delicate fields,but may provide convenience for art and cultural exchanges.However,translation assessment,especially literary translation assessment,has no huge breakthrough yet.Though it has gone beyond critics’ subjective casual judgments,it still lacks a set of theoretical framework which can be ridded on to conduct more systemic analyses.Poetry,as the most beautiful and highly compressed language expression,is regarded as the hardest genre for translating.While,the assessment of the poetry translation quality has always been concerning subjective emotions and attitudes.Without an objective criteria,the poetry translation assessments are often conducted with personal judgments by the critics,which may easily lead to the dictatorship in literary translation area.Thus,this study tries to seek for a set of theory can be applied in poetry translation assessment,which may benefit translation assessment of other genres.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar puts forward that language involves three meta-functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Halliday takes ideational function as “a means of expression of our experience,both of the external world and of the inner world of our own consciousness".What happens in the real world can be conveyed with this function.It helps people to understand what happens in the world and in their mind.Ideational function can be further divided into experiential function and logical function,and transitivity,which directly associates the language and the reality,is a major method to achieve experiential function.Bypresenting processes,participants and circumstantial elements,transitivity system makes language able to present man’s experiences both in the society and in their mental world.Halliday(1971)first applies transitivity system to literature analysis.He analyzes the literary style of the novel The Inheritors by W.Golding with transitivity system,after which scholars realized transitivity system may be a good framework for literature analysis.Kennedy used systemic grammar in literary analysis in 1982.Zhu Shichang is the first in China to employ the transitivity system to the field of literary analysis in 1995.Shen Dan(2006)also points out that the stylistic analysis based on linguistic characteristics is helpful for revealing the complex relationship between the hidden writer and the real writer.Transitivity system has also been employed to Chinese-English translation analysis.Huang Guowen discusses “Xun Yin Zhe Bu Yu”(2002a),“Qing Ming”(2002b),and “Tian Jing Sha·Qiu Si”(2003a),which attaches great importance to providing insight for the translation studies and testing the feasibility of applying transitivity system into discourse analysis.On the basis of Halliday’s SFG theory,this thesis tentatively investigates the applicability of transitivity system to English-Chinese poetry translation assessment.Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and its four Chinese translations are selected as the corpus for this study.The researcher identifies the transitivity process type of each clause,concludes and compares the proportion of each type of transitivity process distributing in the source text and the target texts.The transitivity process patterns of each line in the source text and the target texts are compared as well.It is found that the transitivity system hidden behind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and the three Chinese translations mainly consist of material processes,relational processes,few verbal processes and behavioral process.For this sonnet,the material processes are helpful for showing what is happening in the nature and how much the poet wants to do for the beauty.Relational processes are employed for adding more description of the material world.According to the comparison of the ST and three TTs,Tu An’s translation is the most equivalent one to the original Sonnet 18 in ideational meaning from the perspective of transitivity system.There’s only 4 transitivity process type shifts in Tu’stranslation,while there are 7,5 and 11 shifts in Sun’s,Liang’s and Huang’s versions.Sun Liang’s translation pays more attention to diction,which makes his translation full of rhymes.It is assumed that Sun’s translation strategy is sacrificing the equivalence in ideational meaning for formal correspondence,which is also meaningful and significant in poetry translation.Liang Zongdai is good at separating and combining clauses,which makes his translation concise and lively.Huang Bikang leverages the form of Chinese Song Poem,making his translation refreshing and impressive.The consistence or deviation of transitivity systems from the source text affects the ideational meaning in the target texts.The consistence of the original transitivity process in target texts is considered more effective in representing the ideational meanings of the original work adequately and reproducing the language effect of the source text.Therefore,the researcher holds the opinion that transitivity system can be applied to poetry translation assessments.However,translators should not be constrained with transitivity system because it is not the only assessment criterion,especially for poetry translation.The form and diction are also significant.Hence,transitivity system can be taken as a good supplement for poetry translation assessments. |
