Study On The Translation Of Shakespeare’s Sonnets From The Perspective Of Theme-Rheme Theory

Halliday, the initiator of Systematic Functional Linguistics, holds that the basic meaningcomponent is function which consists of ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunctionand textual metafunction. In translation practice and study, ideational metafunction andinterpersonal metafunction gain much more attention, namely, the equivalence on levels suchas word for word and sentence for sentence is emphasized so much in either translation studyor translation practice, while the textual metafunction which weighs so much in textconstruction and cohesion is usually ignored. As one of the important approaches in textanalysis, Theme-Rheme theory helps translators clearly understand the structure of theoriginal text, thus translators can precisely represent the author’s way of text planning in thetarget language, impressing readers with the essence of the original text.Poetry translation is always challengeable for its concise language and implicit meaningexpressing, and simple semantic equivalence can hardly deliver its essence, which isespecially hard for English poetry as it concerns so much of hypotaxis. This paper studies thetranslation of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reference to Gu Zhengkun’s and Liang’s Zongdai’stranslations. Under the guidance of Theme-Rheme theory, it makes comparative studybetween the original text and Gu’s and Liang’s translations from the perspectives of Thematicstructure and Thematic Progression (TP), after which it is found that translation under theguidance of Theme-Rheme theory is communicative functional oriented, namely, what istranslated is the dynamic information flow rather than fixed words, phrase or sentences,which highlights the communicative function of translation. So under the guidance ofTheme-Rheme theory, researchers can analyze and evaluate translation from the perspectiveof information equivalence, which indicates that Theme-Rheme theory has intrusivesignificance to studies on English-Chinese poetry translation criticism. Meanwhile, throughcomparative study between the original and the two Chinese versions, some pertinentsuggestions are provided for the translation of thematic structure and TP. In English-Chinesepoetry translation, translators are suggested to consciously transfer English subject-theme to Chinese topic-theme, and aware the importance of the transformation of marked theme in thetarget text. To represent the author’s original text planning and communicative intension,translators should try best to represent the original TP, while when the representation of theoriginal TP distort the expression of target language, proper adjustments are needed and newTP should be established in target text in accordance with the expression habit of targetlanguage.