The Application Of Functional Linguistics' Theme-Rheme Theory In Translation

Theme and Rheme were put forward by Czech linguist Mathesius, which aims to study how different elements in a sentence exert different functions. Later the systematic functional linguistic school, represented by Halliday, accepted by this pair of terms, and absorbed them as an important part of its theoretic system. By taking Theme-Rheme theory as translation semantic unit in this thesis, the writer compares different English-Chinese Thematic structures both in clausal level and textual level, and analyses the similarities and differences in rearranging the internal semantic meaning of them, trying to exploring regularitiesof decomposing the source text and dynamic patterns of recomposing the target text. The writer uses the method of generalization. Through a lot of detailed examples, common rules are come by, which can be used to direct translation. There're still some novel findings that the writer gets in, namely a new kind of classification of Theme. As we know, English pay attention to hypotactic relations while Chinese pay more attention to paratactic relations. Such mental distinctions are bound to be realized in sentence structures, so explicit and implicit Theme appears. And furthermore, the writer also comes up with some concepts about Thematic progression patterns. So many examples and analysis can easily draw us to a new conclusion: Functional Linguistics' Theme-Rheme theory should be applied to translation practice. Choosing Theme-Rheme structure as translation unit helps translators make a comparison between English and Chinese Thematic structures in order to make it easier to find the semantic connections between source text and target text for them. In that case, the target version is not only faithful to the source text, but also in accordance to the habitual usage of target language. In addition to translation, such exploration also does help to teaching practice by enhancing teachers' related theoretical basis and the cognitive ability to arrange knowledge background. In a word, the study of Theme-Rheme theory will be of great significance intranslation.