Contrastive Analyses And Evaluation Of Ancient Chinese Poems And Their English Translations From The Perspective Of Textual Metafunction

M. A. K. Halliday points out clearly that the purpose of constructing systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is to offer a theoretical outline for discourse analysis. The theory of three metafunctions of language is an important part of SFL which is very often applied to the discourse analysis by linguists. Textual metafunction is one of the three metafunctions and it is also a most important part. Some scholars or linguists home and abroad have already made some researches on discourse analysis under the guidance of textual metafunctions theories, and they have already proved that the application of textual metafunctions to discourse analysis is practicable and operable. Textual metafuntion consists of three main subcategories:thematic structure, information structure and cohesion system.Tang poetry is one special type of discourses, and it is famous for its refined language and its strict length. Scholars in China adopt SFL approach to analyze Tang poems and their English translations, most of whom choose to adopt three metafunctions perspective. However, most of their researches still stagnated at the analysis level, few made the evaluation of the translation quality. The thesis analyzes two famous Tang frontier poems "Cong Jun Xing"(从军行) and"Liang Zhou Ci"(凉州词) and their English translations. The aim of the analyses is to evaluate the English versions. The evaluation parameter is the maximum information transference of the English translations under the textual metafunction translators construct. The objectives of the thesis on the one hand is to prove that textual metafunction has its feasibility and operability in the contrastive discourse analysis of Chinese poems and their English translations, and on the other hand is to evaluate English translations based on the analyses made.There are some findings of the thesis. First, textual metafunction can be used to analyze the poems and their English translations, and the different choices of Theme-Rheme structures, information focuses and cohesive devices will definitely affect the information flow. Second, language differences apparently have great impact on the language used in poems. The language used in Chinese poems is very random, while in English translations the language used is much stricter. Differences of Theme-Rheme structure, information structure and cohesion system exist in Chinese and English poems, therefore translators need to make related adjustments when they translate the poem. The blind pursuit of the equivalence in textual metafunction between the poem in SL and TL will lead to inappropriate translation.There are also some limitations of the thesis. Because of the limited length of the thesis, the data used is too monistic; the evaluation parameter is based on the maximum information transference in the English version under the Theme-Rheme structure, information focus and cohesive devices translators adopt, which seems to be a little partial.