Theme In Textual Translation Between Chinese And English

Since 1960s, translation studies begin to draw upon findings in other subjects to describe and explain the problems and phenomena in translation practice, which offers some new perspectives for further research. From the perspective of thematic theory, particularly in virtue of Systemic-functional Grammar, this paper broadly discusses the textual translation between Chinese and English with the aim to explore the role theme plays in it.Combined with authentic examples, this paper makes careful classification and comparison of themes in both Chinese and English in terms of mood, internal structure and expression ways based on the classification given by Halliday, namely Simple Theme, Multiple Themes and Clause Theme. It is pointed out that there are a lot of similarities between English and Chinese. However, due to the differences in language habit and thinking mode of Chinese and English, there are also differences. Based on the similarities and differences in themes of the two languages, the author puts forward several conversion rules between them, namely character acting as theme, the contrast of themes, time and place adverbial acting as theme as well as outside-structure and theme. Meanwhile, it is argued that thematic displacement in translation is a prevalent phenomenon which can be classified into reasonable and unreasonable thematic displacement. Given that theme is an important concept in a clause as message, it is the starting-point of the message and stands for the thematic topic of the communicators. The translator should attach much importance to the function of theme in the process of translation and try to avoid unreasonable thematic displacement while appropriately take advantage of reasonable ones so as to get an equivalent translation, not only in terms of ideational meaning but also in terms of informational structure.Finally, the author discusses the role theme plays in textual cohesion and coherence from clausal and textual level. It is pointed out that theme is not only helpful for a better understanding of ST but also discriminating the slight differences in languages. Moreover, the unfolding mode of themes can be helpful to master the author's purpose and thinking process of original text to achieve the equivalence between the two languages.