| This thesis focuses on the empirical analysis of thematic patterns and connectors (conjunctions and discourse markers) in the thematic position in the genre of tourist literature on the basis of a small-scale study. The concept of "theme" adopted here draws on Halliday's (1985) definition of thematic structure. The study is carried out on a corpus which consists of "comparable texts" (Baker 1998) (texts written in English and texts in English translated from Chinese). The corpus consists of 40 texts: 20 original English texts selected from four books and 20 translated English texts from Chinese taken from another four books.The paper is divided to five chapters. The first chapter introduces the research problem and hypothesizes that translation forms a system of its own and develops a unique convention of thematic patterns and thematised connectors. And the main terms (theme, connector and gene convention) involved in this work are defined in this part. The second chapter provides a comparatively full-scale review of the latest studies on the use of comparable corpus in translation research. The third chapter deals with the selection of corpus. And this is followed by a detailed description and analysis on the distinctions of general features of Theme patterns and Textual Theme (connectors) in the corpus of English texts and English translations. Finally, the main findings are briefly restated—thematic patterns and thematised connectors in English translations do present themselves in a different distribution, compared with English original texts. It is expected that the results will cast light on the study on the translated English texts, as compared with those produced by native writers of the language as well as translation teaching in China. |
