Literary Translation From A Thematic Perspective

This thesis studies literary translation from a theme-rheme perspective with translation examples selected from the English novel Gone with the Wind and Chinese prose collections. Literary translation differs from political translation and translation for specific purposes in that the language in literary works and translation is more colorful, sentence structure more flexible, and emotion more tumultuous to push forward the plot and build up a climax. It is in this very aspect that theme and rheme configuration plays an important role and the choice of theme and rheme in the clause and their cohesion or hooking in the discourse should therefore be directed to this end.This thesis probes into the rhetorical esthetics of theme-rheme configuration, marked theme in particular, and its corresponding translation approaches from the perspectives of clauses, moods, and discourse thematic progression patterns, holding that the marked theme has the effect of emphasis, contrast, sarcasm, cohesion, rhythm, end weight (sentence structural balance), etc., and that the translator should pay attention to both the rhetorical effect of marked theme and the target language expression as well as the macro context. The conscious employment of marked theme in translation has its deviant and unique effect and can help improve the quality of translation.For discourse translation and analysis, this thesis adopts Xu Shenghuan's Four Patterns of thematic progression, namely parallel, constant, linear and crossing, which work together to constitute a text (邓森2003:289-290). The author compares the thematic progression patterns in English and Chinese through case study and analysis and finds that the parallel and constant patterns are more frequent in both languages than the other two patterns and thus in most cases can be retained in translation; the constant pattern is more frequent in Chinese than in English, so in EC translation the constant pattern can be largely retained while in CE translation it may need certain modification depending on the context. The crossing pattern of thematic progression is the least frequent in both languages and in translation requires specific analysis.