A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Return Of The Native From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

Many scholars have proved that Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is helpful and insightful in describing and explaining translation phenomena. It becomes more and more credible to interpret various texts with the three metafunctions---ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, which is one of the core theories of SFG. According to SFG, meaning can be decoded by functional analysis, which provides an effective method to understand the source text and compare the original text with the target text.The Return of the Native is the representative of Hardy’s "novels of character and environment". Since published in 1878, it has been much studied and praised highly. It has been translated into more than ten Chinese versions, and they have been studied from various angles in China, such as teleology, hermeneutics, sociosemiotics. But so far, just a few researches have been specially made to explore its Chinese versions from the perspective of SFG. This thesis comparatively studies its three Chinese versions from the perspective of SFG, and tries to find out what kinds of methods have been taken to achieve three metafunctions of the source text.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One gives an introduction to the background, aims, research methods and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews the related studies of applying SFG to translation research both at home and abroad, and the translation studies of The Return of the Native. Chapter Three introduces the development of SFG, and one of its core theories namely three metafunctions. Chapter Four makes a comparative study of three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native from the perspective of SFG, then summarizes the methods of transferring three metafunctions in translation, for example accurately reproducing functional components of the source text, literal translation and conversion of thematic structure. Chapter Five summarizes the main content of the thesis, and points out that in transferring ideational functional and interpersonal fucntional, Sun Yu’s translation is relatively better than Zhang Guruo’s and Wang Shouren’s, while in transferring textual functional, Wang Shouren’s tanslation is relatively better.