| The Systemic-Functional Grammar, put forward and developed by M. A. K.Halliday, has so far been widely applied to various text types in text analysis. And thisresearch is designed to explore the features of transitivity in English lyrical prose andtheir Chinese versions, and to find out the regularities of translations’ transitivity andby comparative analysis of the Chinese versions, some discussions are madeaccordingly. The originality of this thesis lies in a functional comparison of a kind ofnewly touched discourse—lyrical prose in English and their Chinese versions. At thesame time, the analysis of the translation from the transitivity perspective offersanother example. Although it is based on only one narrow part of this grammar,hopefully the outcome can be more or less enlightening to other researches related.The author intends to find answers to these questions:(1) What are the respectivefeatures of English lyrical prose and their Chinese versions from the transitivityperspective?(2) What are the causes of the shifting of the processes of transitivity?Through the statistical calculation of the transitivity distribution and analysis ofthe samples, this study discovers that: as the same genre of discourse, English lyricalprose and the Chinese versions show more similarities than differences; material andrelational and mental processes make up the majority; other minor types includebehavioral, verbal and existential processes; among the six process types, materialprocess occupies the most prominent position; in the two modes of relational process,the attributive one far surpasses the identifying one. The second discovery is that mostpart of the processes remain the same in the course of translating; among thoseprocesses which undergo process shift they are mainly the material and relationalprocesses; for material processes which shift, they mainly shift into relational onesbecause English has a greater propensity for the use of passive voice, but Chinesedoes not and so relational process is used as a solution to this difference; anotherreason is due to the rearrangement of the grammatical structures; the third is becauseof the impersonal style in English and personal style in Chinese; sometimes the use offigures of speech can cause the process shift too. Concerning the shift of the relationalprocess they are mainly shifted into material processes for the following reasons: oneis that the related nouns, prepositions and prepositional phrases all imply certainactions or activities; the other is that the Chinese language prefers to use verbs inexpressing the attributes which denote feelings and are used with link verbs in thesource texts. As for other processes which undergo fewer shifts, the reasons are various like the difference for the sentence composition, different preferences forstatic and dynamic quality, or for impersonal and personal style or the use of figure ofspeech. Plus, three deviations from transitivity perspective in the translation arerevealed too. And despite this all the Chinese versions can mostly capture theideational meaning realized by transitivity, and under these circumstances the shiftingof process types or process components need not be given much attention.The present thesis is significant because with a detailed analysis of the samples,the thesis attempts to provide a new and objective data to describe their prominentfeatures of English lyrical prose and its Chinese versions from the perspective oftransitivity, and the analysis of underlying causes for the change of transitivity and theinfluence to the translations are referentially helpful. First, the results will offer moreabout the ideational features of the two genres. Second, the comparison of the featuresof ideational meaning between the English lyrical prose and the Chinese versions cangive writers a good hint for the process of lyrical prose translations from English toChinese. Besides, when concerning the translations, the shortcomings and suggestionsof the study can be referentially resorted to. |
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