On Textual Coherence In Novel Translation From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Theory

As one important device for textual analysis,thematic progression is of great significance in building and developing textual coherence.By splitting sentences of a text into theme and rheme,the interrelation between sentences and even paragraphs within a text and the rules of information distribution can be figured out.Nowadays,many scholars have applied thematic progression theory in translation studies by analyzing the thematic progression patterns in different types of discourse and exploring the corresponding translation strategies.However,there is only few research done on literary translation,especially novel translation,from the perspective of thematic progression theory.Therefore,in this thesis,the author will try to carry out a study on novel translation from the perspective of thematic progression theory – to analyze how thematic progression patterns contribute to textual coherence,to explore the function of different thematic progression patterns in building coherence effect in the text of novel,and to figure out how to reproduce the thematic progression patterns of the source text in C-E novel translation.Based on the previous studies,this thesis will use Yang Jiang’s novel Baptism and its English version by Judith M.Amory and Shi Yaohua as the corpus.The author will first analyze the features of thematic progression patterns used in the source text of Baptism and find out how they contribute to coherence,based on which,the author will further explore the function of each thematic progression pattern in building specific coherence effect in the text of novel.After analyzing the source text of Baptism,the author will carry out a comparative study of the source text and the translation of Baptism and evaluate whether Judith M.Amory and Shi Yaohua successfully reproduce the thematic patterns and coherence effect of the source text.Finally,the author will try to summarize the strategies for reproducing the thematic progression patterns and coherence effect of the source text in C-E novel translation,which can provide certain inspiration for future translation practice.