Sentence-initial Adverbials In English Translations Of Chinese University Profiles

The thesis adopts the information structure theory and markedness theory of Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar to analyse the marked/unmarked features of Chinese and English texts. It points out that in C-E translation different ways to deal with marked/unmarked structures indicate the translator’s different attitudes toward the starting points of information, which may further impacts the textual information coherence. To show it in a more transparent way, the thesis analyzes sentences with marked themes in English translations of Chinese university profiles, especially the sentence-initial adverbials which includes past participle phrases, present participle phrases, infinitive phrases, prepositional phrases, adverbial phrases. It aims to find out whether the marked structures as starting points of information meet the information feature of the whole discourse and whether the unmarked structures in the source language should be translated with marked structures in the target language. It is hoped that the analysis will push translators to give more attention to the textual information coherence in their translating process.