A Contrastive Research On English And Chinese Text Type And Their Renditions

Since translatology is an open, comprehensive and interdisciplinary science and art, translation theory should be established in this scientific framework. From the 1990s, western scholars began to introduce the theories of text linguistics into translation studies. These translation studies taking text linguistics as theoretical background hold that both translation and equivalence are on the textual level. Text linguistics regards translation as a top-down process i.e. translator should first decide the genre, type or communication function of the text in the target language culture and then reproduce the expected text through concrete language structure. In translation practice, recomposing a text suited to the target language society does not rest on the shift of surface structure (sentences) but on the selection of language resources with certain aim from top to bottom and then rewrite the whole text. Taking text as translation unit does not mean that translation can neglect words and sentences, from which the actual process of translation always starts. What the text consciousness emphasizes is that translating practice on every level should be carred out with the higher level in the background. The whole discourse or text is the final point of decision making in translating and the final judge of the quality of target textIn the present translation studies, translation has not been viewed as a static product in certain text form any longer but as a dynamic and inter-cultural process. As communication is fulfilled through text, the participants of the communication have certain shared understandings of the text type and structure which are stored in their minds as knowledge. Texts as certain information carrier are formed by certain pattern and can activate the knowledge in the mind of the readers and therefore the communication can be achieved. The process of translation is a process of selecting. The reason why text type is important is that it is closely related to content, form andtranslation strategies as well. Text type, language elements and non-language factors should all be taken into consideration when analyzing the source text. The studies on text type in translation started from the Reiss' research in 1970s. Her theory starts with universal commonness of the text type, then analyzes the peculiarity of different types and thereby establishes the translation typology. Although there is no such a method that can suit the translation of all text types, different text type needs different translation strategy.Taking text type as a cut-in point, this thesis divides texts into three types: texts of argumentation, texts of exposition and texts of instruction based upon Hatim's way of classification. Then it makes a contrastive research on the similarities and differences of the English and Chinese text type. The similarities of text type exist between both English and Chinese make language shift possible so successful translation should reproduce the character and function of the source text. The differences of text type caused by thinking mode and culture are mainly manifested through text development and cohesion and constitute the high or low degree of translatability. This thesis will expound the relationship between text type and translation strategy, i.e. how text type affect the choice of translation strategy.