A Comparative Study On The English Translations Of Xun Zi’s Quanxue From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

Quanxue is an essay that embodies Xunzi’s thoughts on “learning”systematically,including the purpose,meaning,attitude and method of learning.As the first of the thirty-two sections of Xunzi,it also reflects the importance Xunzi attached to “learning”.Since its inception in 1928,the English translation of Quanxue has been more than ninety years,and scholars such as H.H.Dubs,Burton Watson,John Knoblock,and Eric L.Hutton have provided its English translations with their own characteristics.However,so far,there is still little research on the English translation of Quanxue,and the few studies are limited to the translations by Burton Watson and John Knoblock,and no scholar has yet compared and analyzed the four available translations of Quanxue,which provides room for this thesis.This thesis will take Halliday’s metafunctional theory of functional grammar as a guide,and on the basis of a wide range of related works and literature on metafunctional theory and discourse analysis,a comparative analysis of the four English translations of Quanxue will be conducted to investigate the reproduction of metafunctions behind them by analyzing the differences and similarities of their lexico-grammatical level.The metafunction includes ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function,among which ideational function can be further divided into experiential function and logical function.By comparing and analyzing the transitivity,interdependence and logico-semantic relations,mood types and person system,Theme structure and cohesive devices in the source text and the four translations,this thesis investigates the reproduction of metafunctions in the source text by the translations,summarizing their reproduction effectiveness,and explores the causes of high effectiveness.The study finds that,firstly,the original text and the four translations differ in the transitivity in the experiential function,the person system in the interpersonal function,and the Theme structure and cohesive devices in the textual function,mostly because of the inherent differences in the organization of English and Chinese as two language families,therefore,this part of the differences cannot be used as a criterion for judging the merits of the translation.Secondly,in terms of interdependence and logico-semantic relations in the logical function and mood types in the interpersonal function,the original text and the four translations show homogeneity due to the text type.Thirdly,John Knoblock’s translation presents the highest effectiveness in terms of metafunctional reproduction,with Burton Watson’s and Eric L.Hutton’s as the second,and H.H.Dubs’ s as the lowest,due to the differences in translator’s translation purpose and their choice of translation methods.Fourthly,as far as the text conveying experience is concerned,the metafunctions in translation in order of importance can be listed as: experiential function,logical function,interpersonal function,and textual function.Although the four translations of Quanxue show differences in the reproduction of textual functions and part of interpersonal function,their reproduction of ideational function is basically consistent with the original text.It is expected that this paper will make some contribution to the subsequent studies of Quanxue,Xunzi,and the application of metafunctional theory to translation studies.