A Corpus-based Study Of The Translation Of Parallel Structures In The Governance Of China ? From The Perspective Of Metafunctions

The Governance of China ? is a collection of President Xi' s important speeches that introduce the governing thoughts and political notions of Chinese leadership.It plays an important role in building a good international image of China and spreading its voices into international community.Parallel structures are widely used in the book,making the discourses more systematic in content and more powerful in effect.For this reason,the translation of parallel structures is of crucial significance to the general translation quality of the book.Accordingly,this thesis is to study the translation of parallel structures in the English version of The Governance of China ? from the metafunctional perspective.Two small corpora are built.One is a collection of parallel structures in the Chinese version of The Governance of China?.The other serves as a reference corpus which includes all parallel structures from 25 English political speeches.Methods of corpus observation,contrastive analysis,quantitative and qualitative analysis are adopted.The software programs of UAM corpus tool and Antconc are used to do metafunctional analysis.Based on corpus statistics,a comparative metafunctional analysis is made to examine parallel structures in original Chinese,Native English and translated English,to find out some metafunctional accordances and changes among them and to evaluate the translation quality of parallel structures in the English version of The Governance of China ?.The comparative metafunctional analysis of Chinese and Native English parallel structure reveals both similarities and differences.The similarities are the dominance of material and relational processes in terms of transitivity and the majority of modulation meanings in terms of modality.The differences in transitivity are reflected that Chinese parallel structures feature high frequency of positive verbs and the repetition of process verbs while English parallel structures are characterized with some frequent sentence patterns and tend to use lexical variety of process verbs.The modality difference is that high modality is used frequently in Chinese parallel structures while median and low modality are dominant in English ones.The metafunctional analysis of translated English parallel structures indicates that the translated version transfers the original message faithfully and improves its acceptance in international community.The faithfulness in transitivity is embodied so that the original pattern of process types distribution and the high frequency of positive verbs are preserved,with 81% translated parallel structures keeping its original process types.The faithfulness in modality is reflected from the specific and precise translations of modal verb “ ? ” and the explicitation of median modal verbs.Static and subordinated expressions,explicitation of inherent semantic correlations,reduction of process verb repetitions and decreased modality value together enhance the acceptance of the translated version in target language.To conclude,the translation of parallel structures in The Governance of China II adequately communicate the messages and effect of the original text and fits the language features of English.In general,its translation quality is worth appreciating.