A Study On English-Chinese Translation Of Academic Discourses From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Patterns

Academic papers feature professional language and complicated sentence structure.It is commonplace to see technical words,long and difficult sentences.Besides,the discourses are generally organized with rigorous logic.One of the major concerns in translating academic papers is to analyze how their ideas are developed.Zhu Yongsheng has pointed out that in the discourses,the relations and changes between themes and rhemes,rhemes and rhemes,themes and rhemes in a sequence of continuous sentences are called progression.Besides,the basic patterns of thematic changes are called thematic progression patterns.They are more or less existent in all kinds of discourses,including academic discourses with logical thinking.As an important discourse analyzing tool,thematic progression patterns,when applied to English-Chinese translation,are beneficial for translators to analyze the themes and rhemes,new and old information distribution in the source text,and to make clear the writer's ideas and communicative intentions,thereby producing correct and smooth translations with reasonable structure.The main body of this thesis is composed of two parts,including the translation project(with the original juxtaposed with the translation)and the translation commentary.The source text is Translation and economics:inclusive communication or language diversity?,an academic paper featuring complex ideas.Thus the author needs to clarify the text ideas and information distribution,as well as grasp the semantic relations among sentences by studying the thematic progression.In the commentary,the author first introduces the formation and development of the thematic theory and thematic progression patterns,and applies four thematic progression patterns proposed by Zhu Yongsheng,namely,parallel,centralized,linear and crossing thematic progression patterns,to analyze the source text.Then the author puts forward two translation strategies,that is retaining the original patterns of the source text and adjusting them,and proposes the translation techniques,including adjusting word order,separation and reorganization,transforming recessive subject to dominant subject,transforming passive voice to active voice,and adding implicit information.It is expected that the translators may take advantage of the thematic progression patterns of the source text in translating the text.In addition,on the basis of considering the similarities and differences between English and Chinese discourse construction and the characteristics of the translation practice,translators can choose whether to retain or adjust the original patterns of the source text so as to produce accurate and understandable translations.