Contrast & Translation Between English And Chinese Text Structures

With the rise and development of text-linguistics, text has become the focus of modern language research free from the boundaries of traditional linguistics and syntax, and a new tendency has come to light that translation theory and its application are inquired into from the perspective of text analysis. A text is a structural unit with complete meaning, realized by one or more sequences of mutually relevant functions structured in such a way as to serve some overall rhetorical purpose. Translation in the dimension of text is basically to convey in one language what is written or said in another language with an essential purpose of representing the communicative value of the original text. It inevitably involves a contrastive study between the source language and the target language. A good knowledge of the similarities and differences between the two languages concerned not only facilitates the translator's thorough and accurate comprehension of the ST as a whole but provides a reliable foundation for each decision that the translator has to make in the translation.According to Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, language has three metafunctions: the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function. Respectively, they express three kinds of meanings, namely, the ideational meaning, the interpersonal meaning, the textual meaning. All languages are organized around these three kinds of meaning and it is therefore desirable to put equal weight on the three kinds of meanings in translation. However, the last one seems to be frequently neglected in traditional translation studies. The concepts of functional equivalence and textual equivalence lay the foundation for text-based translation. A translator of text is supposed to convey the overall rhetoricalpurpose of the original author and ensure the target reader of coherent understanding similar to the source text. Text organization is a composite process. Different languages may prefer different structural formats in text composition. The shared points in structures are our basis on which we make comparison and do transferring, and the contrasts enable the translator's response to the source text and negotiation with the original author. If the maintenance of the structure of the ST would impair the target reader's comprehension, the translator should recreate the structure which is functionally parallel, though not identical, to that of the original text.The thesis is composed of four chapters besides an introduction and a conclusion.Chapter One presents the text-linguistic concepts on which the analysis of textual structure is based from the angle of text translation, including text and discourse, text structure and texture, coherence and cohesive etc.Chapter Two describes the theoretical validity of contrastive studies of text structures in English and Chinese. Some theories concerning textuality, text unit and equivalence principle of translation are employed.Chapter Three makes a detailed examination in contrastive text structures between English and Chinese both at the macro-level and at the micro-level. At the macro-level, we explore different logical modes of thinking and their influences on text structures in ET and CT; at the micro-level, we try to discover different manifestations of texture between ET and CT, including different coherent structures and thematic patterns.Chapter Four gives a full discussion about the specific operation procedures, i.e., the decomposing procedure and the composing procedure, and the strategies in modifying text structure. If the maintenance of the original structure impairs the communicative effect of the target text, onehas to reconstruct the source text in order to achieve the same rhetorical i-.function.