A Metafunctional Study On The Translation Of University Presidents’ Welcome Messages-a Corpus-based Approach

University presidents’ welcome messages (hereafter referred to as UPWMs) onthe website are the words published on the university website written in the name ofpresident of the university. The president introduces the history of the university,teaching features, the scale of the faculty and enrollment, features of services,teaching and scientific category, and principles and missions they are pursuing.Though many scholars have analyzed this unique discourse by applying linguistictheories, few of them use metafunction theory to analyze the university presidents’welcome messages. This paper aims to run an extended analysis of UPWMs bystudying the realization of the ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction andtextual metafunction. It would also help to improve the skills of writing andtranslating the English UPWMs for non-English native speaker.The thesis attempts to answer following two questions. Firstly, do the threemetafunctions really exist in the Chinese Universities (CU) and English-speakingcountries’ Universities (EU) president welcome messages? If yes, how are theyreflected? Secondly, How to evaluate the three functions in Chinese-Englishtranslation of president welcome messages? Which language habits are the translatedtexts of UWPMs from Chinese website more inclined to in terms of threemetafunctions?Based on Halliday’s three metafunctions theory, the author chose45UPWMsfrom the websites from china and English-speaking countries (15from UPWMs ofChinese websites,15from translated UPWMs of Chinese websites and15fromUPWMs of foreign websites) as the corpus of the study, mainly focusing on theideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Then the thesisdescribed the findings of this research mainly focusing on the relationship betweenthe frequency of metafunctions and the UWPMs with the help of Chi-square test fromSPSS. The main findings are listed as follows:First, the ideational function is mainly realized through transitivity system, which constructed by five processes (material process, mental process, relational process,existential process and verbal process). In the five processes, the material process tooka major part in UPWMs from China and English-speaking countries. There is nodifference between source language texts (SL) and target language texts (TL) ofChinese Universities (CU) in terms of process types, while the significant differencewas found between target language texts (TL) of CU and source language texts (SL)of EU in terms of process types.Second, the interpersonal function is mainly realized through interpersonalsystem in UPWMs. In the SL of CU, the third person pronouns got the largest numberin four pronouns counted in the text. There is a significant difference between SL andTL of CU in terms of personal pronouns. While in TL of CU and SL of EU, the firstperson plural form took the largest part in four pronouns. The difference can bedetected for there is no difference between TL of CU and SL of EU if ignoring thethird person pronouns.Third, the textual function is mainly realized through cohesion devices inUPWMs, which specifically constructed by four grammatical cohesions (reference,substitution, ellipsis and conjunction). A significant difference could be found in thenumber of cohesion devices between SL of TL and TL of CU. In the meantime,UWPMs of Chinese websites usually used ellipsis to realize the inner logic in Chineselanguage, while UWPMs of foreign websites usually use conjunctions to realize thelogical relationship.With research findings listed above, the present thesis indicates the followingimplications:On the one hand, a tentative framework for metafunctional analysis wasestablished in present research and may be used in similar studies later for reference.On the other hand, this research deepens the understanding of Chinese and westernculture as well as the speech discourse. With the application of system linguistictheory into the practice of translation by both qualitative method and quantitativemethod, it makes a contrastive analysis about the features of English and Chineselanguages through UWPMs.