A Contrastive Analysis Of Theme And Thematic Progression Pattern Between The Golden Cangue And Its English Version

As one of the main components of Textual metafunctions,Theme and Thematic Progression play an important role in making a cohesive and coherent text.The earliest mention of Theme can be traced back to the age of Plato.Then after years of practice and perfection,Theme is defined as the "starting point" of the information in Systemic Functional Linguistics,while Rheme as everything else that follows in the sentence.However significant,the study of Theme is about the analysis of one single clause.When researchers come to the analysis of a whole text,they will find the existence of connections between Themes and Rhemes.This kind of connection is called Thematic Progression.Danes,a Czech linguist,first suggests five Thematic Progression patterns:simple Linear pattern,constant Theme pattern,derived Theme pattern,derived Rheme pattern and summative/spring pattern.Based on Danes’patterns,Fries suggests that Thematic Progression patterns are closely related with genres.To make a contrastive study,this dissertation applies Eileen Chang’s Jin Suo Ji and her corresponding self-translation The Golden Cangue as data.With the guidance of our government’s Culture "Steeping-out" policy,more and more scholars are interested in translating our own literature works to foreign countries.This dissertation tries to discover how we can do a better translation from the perspective of Theme and Thematic Progression patterns.A method of the combination of quantitative and qualitative study is applied in this dissertation.First of all,an identification of Theme and Thematic Progression patterns is made to the Chinese novel and then a statistical number is obtained after a careful research.Second,the same analysis is made to the English novel and a statistical number is obtained,too.The third step is to make a statistical contrast between the statistic numbers of the two novels.A conclusion is reached and after that some potential reasons for similarities and differences will be discussed.The results show that despite the differences between languages,choosing Themes and Thematic Progression patterns remain the same and further proves that the application of Thematic Progression pattern is closely related with genre.Yet besides the general similarities,English novel tends to make a more complete story while Chinese novel tends to make a more specific description about the characters.The findings of this dissertation can be both theoretically and practically significant.Theoretically,this dissertation confirms the relationship between Thematic Progression patterns and genres,regardless of the difference in languages.Practically,the dissertation suggests that translators could try to rebuild the source text’s Thematic Progression pattern in the target text to create a better translation.In addition,the findings can also be applied to English teaching to help students to gain a better sense of English.