The Cultural Lost In The Translation Of Chinese Ancient Poems-from The View Of Functional Grammar

Metaphor had traditionally been considered merely an rhetorical way in the literal works.From 1970s the metaphor gains most of the linguists attention. Halliday took the grammatical metaphor into the field of the metaphor researching, which gained the attention of the linguists especially the attention of the linguists of systematic functional grammar. In ancient time, the people also pay attention to the grammatical metaphor in the world. Lao Zi talked about the grammatical metaphor in his work Too The ChingAccording to Halliday and Thompson(2004), grammatical metaphor refers to a metaphorical expression of a meaning. According to the three metafunctions of language, grammatical metaphor is classified into three types: ideational metaphors, interpersonal metaphors and textual metaphors.The present thesis uses the theory of the grammatical on the base of functional grammar through giving the analyses to the Chinese ancient poems and the different translations respectively, try to find out the function of grammar tin the creating of text, in the foregrounding of the text and the aesthetic function the foregrounding creates. On the same time, the thesis gives the comparison and analyses to the Chinese ancient poems and their translations, thus find out the character and the deep reason of the cultural lost in the translating process.The present thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is primarily intended to deal with a few problems which associated with the grammatical metaphor.These problems include 1) the history of grammatical metaphor and 2) the main kinds of grammatical metaphor according the idea of Halliday. The history of grammatical metaphor dates back to the ancient times, we can conclude that it is the metaphor that goes with the history of the processing and the developing of language. Halliday considers metaphor as a kind of variation. In his opinion, grammatical metaphor is the"variation in the expression of a given meaning". The author thinks that lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor are only two different perspectives on metaphor and they are complementary to each other(Halliday 2004).The second chapter talks about the expression of the grammatical metaphors of the Chinese ancient and their use in the creating of the text. In this chapter, the author first gives analyses to the expressions of the grammatical metaphor and thus defines the use in the process of the Chinese ancient poems' creating.In the third chapter, the author focuses on the function of grammatical metaphor in the foregrounding of the Chinese ancient poems and in the aesthetic affects that produced by the foregrounding of the poem. Because of the language the poets use is the language of foregrounding, the semantic reason why the poets use this foregrounding language and why the reader can understand the foregrounding language are the same, so this semantic reason is worth to catch an analyses. In the same time, the interaction of the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object in the definition of the poem is also worthy to pay attention to. So in this chapter, the author gives analyses to the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object.Chapter four is the core of this thesis. In this chapter, the author use the grammatical metaphor based on the theory of functional grammar to do the comparison to the Chinese ancient and their translations respectively. After the analyses, the author find out the deep reason of the cultural lost in the process of translating. Through the analyses to the materials, the author gains the conclusion that it is because of the difference of the grammatical metaphor mode of the two languages and the translator's choose of mode cause the cultural lost while translating.In chapter five the author gives the definition to the cultural lost while translating on the cultural difference and the different of cognition level and offers the way to solve the problem.In the conclusion of the thesis, through the analyses in the former part, the author probes the representation of grammatical metaphor, the difference of cultural and the aesthetic judgment in the poem. The author point out that the metaphor structure is the base of the comprehension to the poetic text, and the choice of the translators to the metaphor structure decides degree of the coherence of the text. In the same time, the aesthetic angle of the translator affects the degree of the success of the translation. Even if the translator chooses the suitable structure of the metaphor and use the suitable aesthetic angle, his translation can catch a success.