A C-E Translation Study On Meditations On The Original Aspiration(Excerpts) Based On Theme-rheme Theory

Meditations on the Original Aspiration is a long oral documentary literary work,one of classics of anti-corruption literature.This novel abandons the didactic style and is written based on oral reports from detained high officials,describing how they degenerated into discipline breakers and then lawbreakers,meanwhile revealing their complicated struggling inner world.Theme-Rheme theory,as an important component of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),has been widely applied into translation studies.Theme and thematic progression pattern(TP pattern)play an important role in the organization and construction of textual message.Meanwhile,the choice of the Theme and TP pattern is meaningful,reflecting the communicative intention of the original author.Theoretically speaking,the Theme and TP pattern should be preserved as much as possible in translation,however,differences between Chinese and English make it impossible to achieve the full preservation of TP pattern in translation.This thesis takes the original work of Meditations on the Original Aspiration(Excerpts)and the English version translated by the author of this thesis as the research objects.The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used to make analysis of the Theme and TP pattern between Meditations on the Original Aspiration and its English version,with an aim to explore to what extent the translator can preserve the Theme and TP pattern,and how the translator preserves and reconstructs the TP pattern in translation.Thus,the application of Theme-Rheme theory is introduced into the C-E translation of documentary literary work,and some practical translation suggestions are summarized for translation of documentary literary work from the textual level.Through research,it's found that in C-E translation,the translator can preserve the majority of the Theme,especially the topical Theme.The preservation rate of topical Theme is higher than that of Theme.The main reason for this phenomenon is that some of simple Themes transform into multiple Themes(textual Theme plus topical Theme),and a few of multiple Themes(textual Theme plus topical Theme)transform into simple Themes.In terms of preservation of TP pattern,the translator can preserve the majority of the TP pattern in the source text(ST),especially the split Rheme pattern,the constant Theme pattern and the linear Theme pattern.In terms of deconstruction and reconstruction of TP pattern,the most deconstructed is the independent pattern,indicating that in C-E translation,the translator is trying to break the jump thinking mode featured by the Chinese;most of deconstructed TP patterns will be reconstructed into the constant Theme pattern and the linear Theme pattern,showing that the translator is trying to construct a text that conforms to the linear thinking mode featured by the Western.Finally,under the combined influence of preservation,as well as deconstruction and reconstruction of TP pattern,there are still meaningful differences in TP pattern between the ST and the translated version;the statistical data show that the differences are meaningful in the constant Theme pattern and the independent pattern.