A Comparative Study On The English Translated Versions Of Mu Lan Ci From The Perspective Of Metafunction Theory In Systemic Functional Grammar

The translation of classic works is a fundamental device in promoting the Chinese culture abroad.Mu Lan Ci,as a classic Chinese poem,has not been widely studied yet though it bears distinct Chinese cultural significance.Therefore,the thesis chooses to study Mu Lan Ci and its translations in order to enrich researches on the translations of Mu Lan Ci and better understand the ballad and its translations.Considering the advantage of metafunction theory in text analysis,the thesis conducts the study from the perspective of metafunction theory in systemic functional grammar.The thesis conducts a comparative study on the English versions of Mu Lan Ci translated respectively by Hans H.Frankel,William Martin,Charles Budd,Wang Rongpei,and Xu Yuanchong.It aims to examine the application of the metafunction theory in translations,the realization of metafunctional equivalence in translation,and the similarities and differences between these versions.It first analyzes the texts from the perspective of the ideational metafunction,the interpersonal metafunction,and the textual metafunction to acquire the statistics,and then calculates the variance value to measure the metafunctional equivalence between the source text and target texts,and at last conducts cases studies to compare different versions from metafunctional perspective.The thesis finds that metafunction theory is applicable in evaluating the translations of Mu Lan Ci in the aspects of the experiential function,the logical function,the mood system,the modality system,and the cohesion system.Besides,Xu’s version achieves the highest metafunctional equivalence,and Martin’s version has the poorest performance.Apart from that,the metafunctional similarities of the translations are the large proportion of the material processes and paratactic structures from the ideational metafunction,the dominant position of declarative clauses and the small number of modal operators from the interpersonal metafunction,the predominance of unmarked themes from the textual metafunction.The metafunctional differences lie in the concrete proportion of these elements in different translations.