A Thematic Progression Approach To The Organization Features Of Chinese And English Political Texts

The increasing development of text linguistics, as well as its application totranslation study, has encouraged more focus on text itself, which has been treated asthe object and even the unit of translation. In text analysis, the focus falls on thecohesion and coherence of the text, which can be achieved through various ways.Thematic progression is one of the ways, and contributes a lot to textual coherence.Thematic progression is considered as “the structural cohesion”, and cooperates withlarge numbers of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in producing a coherent text.The increasing popularity of text analysis also encourages translation study on aspecific genre, for different genres of texts require not only different transfer methods,but also different equivalence criteria in translation. Having examined the genre-basedtranslation study in recent years, we are sorry to find that the genre of political texts hasbeen left far behind. Meanwhile, the limited studies in this area indicate an absence oftheoretical framework and an overlook of the textual level on the whole.The thematic theory and the genre of political texts were perfectly combined inthis paper. Exemplified by Report on Government Work and State of the Union Address,the present study investigated the organization features of both Chinese and Englishpolitical texts in terms of thematic progression patterns and cohesive devices, throughwhich we were informed of how such a genre employed TP patterns and cohesivedevices to achieve textual coherence. It addressed the following research questions:1: What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and English politicaltexts in terms of structure and cohesive devices?2: To what extent does a translator stick to the original TP patterns during thecourse of political translation? Are there any laws of transferences of TP patterns? 3: Which among the following is the most appropriate unit in translation: word,clause, sentence, or even a whole discourse?Having identified and classified the distribution frequencies of the TP patterns andcohesive devices employed in each of the three texts, the Chi-square test was employedto canvass whether there was any significant difference between these figures. On thebasis of the quantitative analysis, a qualitative analysis was further carried out toillustrate an elaborated description and comparison of the organization features betweenChinese and English political texts. The combination of the quantitative and qualitativeanalysis together provided the major findings, which are displayed as follows:Firstly, there basically exists a common trend in writers’ selection of TP patterns inpolitical texts both at home and abroad. They both employ multiple TP patterns inproducing a text, among which the parallel model, the concentrated model and thecontinuous model occur more frequently, especially the parallel model. Such asimilarity in choosing TP patterns stems from the common recognition of theorganization features of political essays. However, the alternative pattern is barely usedin both texts.Apart from similarities, there also exist some differences between Chinese andEnglish political texts in terms of TP patterns, in that the latter tends to employ morediverse TP patterns than the former. The concentrated model is preferable in theChinese political text, but not so welcome in English texts, which would otherwiseprefer the continuous pattern.On the other hand, the continuity of diverse TP patterns relies on the choices ofvarious cohesive devices, which are worthy to be noticed. Both texts share a lot in theiruse of substitution and reiteration, in which the former is barely used while the latter isemployed in abundance. However, the translation of cohesive devices is not one-to-onecorrespondent, among which the most significance lies in the use of personal reference,conjunction and ellipsis. It can be safely concluded that in English political texts, thefrequency is much higher than that in Chinese ones.Last but not the least, an independent sentence is considered to be the basictranslation unit. Here, a “sentence” is marked by a semicolon, a period, a question mark or an exclamation mark, excluding the comma, and colon. Meanwhile, necessaryreference for a larger context can’t be overlooked. Sometimes, we may change into adifferent unit in accordance with practical needs: when dealing with a relatively smallunit, we can put it into a larger context or unit it belongs to; meanwhile, we can also puta relatively large unit into a much larger translation unit or even the whole textualcontext for reference.To sum up, thematic progression not only contributes a lot in understanding thegeneration mode of political texts, but also provides a standard with which to transferbetween the two languages properly. The findings have shed light on the organizationfeatures of political texts from both the macro and micro levels, a better understandingof which will provide a newer and better guidance for translation practice.