A Contrastive Analysis Of The Tang Poem Song You Ren And Its English Versions From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar has experienced a rapid development since it was first introduced into China in 1970s. Nowadays, there has appeared a tendency of analyzing and evaluating translations under this theoretical framework. This thesis is an attempt to study the translation of the classical Chinese poem Song You Ren from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar.To testify the feasibility of Systemic Functional Grammar applied in appreciating the poem's translations, this thesis explores the realization of three meta-functions of the poem as well as its ten translated versions. To be specific, the original poem and its ten English versions are considered as texts and this paper probes into their realization of the three meta-functions in terms of transitivity, logical relations, mood structure, thematic structure and cohesion of the texts, and gives a descriptive criticism of these texts.The thesis finds out to some extent the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar works well with the analyses of the translations. In the realization of ideational function, most translators stick to the mainstream of the process types as well as logical relations, showing that they manage to represent similar experiences depicted in the original poem. Still some shifts exist and explanations are given in the paper. Compared to the realization of ideational function, more shifts exist in translations in realizing interpersonal and textual functions due to different characteristics of Chinese and English. By applying the framework of three meta-functions in Systemic Functional Grammar, it is possible to offer a systematic appreciation of the original poem and its translations from a more comprehensive and scientific perspective.Systemic Functional Grammar not only provides a new angle for translation studies of classical Chinese poems, but also helps to guide poetry translation practice. Still, limitations of applying this approach to poetry translation also exist and they are listed in the last part in this paper.