Exploring Chinese-English Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Topic Chain

In recently years,more and more Chinese classics have been translated into English for publication.In particular,the pace of translation and overseas promotion of Chinese literary works has been acclerated.This is of great significance for implementing the national policy of “Chinese culture going global”.Unfortunately,there is not much research on the translation strategies concerning the discursive level of Chinese literary works from the perspective of topic chain.Chinese,a topic-prominent and text-oriented language,has distinct textual features.Residing in the intersection of topic and text,the topic chain is one of the most representative characteristics of Chinese text.This may bring difficulties in meeting the expectations of English readers of the translated Chinese literary works.A deep understanding of the nature and mechanism of Chinese topic chain and cross-language contrastive analysis can provide a new perspective for the practice of Chinese-English translation and the study of translation strategies.Under the guidance of cognitive linguistics,this thesis starts from the relationships and differences between subject and topic,and discusses the access between subject and topic.From the perspective of topic chain,this study attempts to propose a new model of text translation,which involes four basic steps: subject of the source text—topic in the source text—topic in the target text—subject of the target text.Then the study explores the cognitive mechanism of the topic chain: principle of economy and accessibility.In essence,it serves as a device to connect two or more clauses and sentences by means of a topic,either visibly or invisibly.The chain leads an information structure,realizing pragmatic functions.The characteristics of topic chains in Chinese and English,and the typological differences between them are discussed.The main differences between Chinese and English topic chains are:(1)a paragraph in Chinese can have more than one topic chain,but that in English can only have one;(2)there are a large number of zero subject sentences in Chinese,but there are few such sentences in English.In terms of textual organization,there is a sharp contrast between Chinese dispersion and English continuity.In Chinese-English text translation,the transformation of topic chain is critical.In a sense,faithfulness to the source text is the faithfulness to its topic chain.This thesis puts forward two basic principles for Chinese-English text translation: the principle of “faithfulness to the topic chain of the source text”,and the principle of "one paragraph,one topic".It holds that the first step for translating Chinese texts into English is to clarify the number and content of topic chains in each Chinese paragraph.Then,according to the linguistic representation of topic chains in the source text,appropriate translation strategies should be selected.For this sake,this study proposes three types of Chinese-English translation strategies:(1)the Concord Method;(2)the Adjustment Method;(3)the Free Method.The Concord Method is used when the linguistic representation of topic chains in the Chinese paragraph is the same as that in English.The Adjustment Method includes three subtypes: decomposition and reconstruction;addition;conversion of telescopic topic Chains.The first refers to the splitting of one Chinese paragraph into two or more English paragraphs according to the number of topic chains in the source text.The text is therefore reconstructed and reorganized.The second subtype refers to the addition of the zero subject in the source text to the target text.The last subtype mainly concerns transformation into attributive clauses.The Chinese topic can be transformed into subject,predicate,predicate,object and adverbial in English translation.The Free method includes the transformation from a bamboo structure to a tree structure,which means translating into parallel sentences or compound sentences.This thesis mainly takes the Chinese literary classics as examples,analyzing various topic chains in classical and modern Chinese.Based on the translation strategies proposed in this thesis,the selected cases are translated,and previous scholars' translations are evaluated.How to make the translation more in line with the reading expectations of English readers is discussed in detail.In sum,from the perspective of topic chain,the thesis gives a new understanding of the translation principle of faithfulness to the source text proposed by former scholars.The new model,principles and methods of text translation put forward in the thesis offer some implications for the practice of translating Chinese into other langauges,opening up a new space for future research on text translation.