| Essay, like the novel, poetry and drama, is a kind of literary genre, includingnarrative, lyric and argumentative essay. It has a long history of several thousandyears in China. We all know that Chinese essay has a distinctive characteristic ofbeing loose in structure but compact in meaning, which makes the C-E essaytranslation task complicated. Some scholars even insisted the untranslatability ofessay, however, most of them hold the view that Chinese essay, carrying thousands ofyears’ culture deposit, is the essence as well as treasure of China. Hence it istranslatable and worthy of being translated. As the representative of this view,professor Zhang Peiji, a famous educator and translator in our country, who commitshimself to Chinese essay translation and makes a great contribution to both essaytheory and essay translation practice.This research takes15narrative essays and their corresponding translatedversions from Professor Zhang’s Selected Modern Chinese Essays and casuallychooses one of them as a sample to show the research process. Then through thequantitative and qualitative analysis of thematic progression patterns of all collecteddata, the author sets up a small database to make a comparison between thedistribution of thematic progression in original Chinese essay and its correspondingtranslated version in order to find out the similarities and differences between them.What’s more, the author will summarize the translation strategies of transference ofTP patterns by professor Zhang and analyze the deep factors causing the choice of TPpatterns. Based on the analysis of all the collected date, this research finds out somesimilarities and differences in use of TP patterns between original Chinese essay andits English version:1) There exist seven types of TP patterns used both in originalnarrative essay and its translated version.2) There are four types of TP patternfrequently used in both original and translated English narrative essay, namelyconstant theme pattern, irregular pattern, continuous pattern and constant rhemepattern.3) The proportion of irregular pattern in Chinese essay is higher than that ofEnglish version. Whereas the proportion of continuous pattern in English version ishigher than that of Chinese text.4) During the C-E translation, professor Zhang exertsthree different transference strategies to deal with the choice of TP patterns in thetarget text.5) Different syntactic features and thinking patterns between Chinese andEnglish affects the choice of TP patterns in target texts.The research result shows that proper choice of TP pattern is beneficial to theC-E essay translation. The translators should preserve the original TP pattern aspossible as they can; If necessary, the author may adjust or reconstruct the TP patternsin the target text to meet the syntactic and grammatical norms and ensure a naturaland coherent target text. |
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