Thematic Progressions In Economic Report Texts And Its E-C Translation

Based on the theories of textual cohesion and coherence in Systemic Functional Linguistics,this thesis,taking the economic report text as an example,focuses on the theme-rheme structure and its thematic progression patterns in the whole discourse,and systematically explores the thematic progression patterns and its translation process in such economic report text.The original text in this thesis is selected from the World Economic Outlook(WEO)published by the International Monetary Fund in 2018,which is a type of economic report text with the theme of the challenges to steady growth faced by world's economies in 2018.The text with a well-organized structure and the rigorous logic has a large number of economic terms.Meanwhile,the original text contains plenty of complex sentences that include many methods of theme-rheme cohesion to make the expression of the original discourse coherent.In addition,the specific research steps of the thesis are as follows: firstly,the theories of theme-rheme and thematic progression patterns in Systemic Functional Linguistics are introduced.Secondly,the thematic progression patterns in original text are classified into four categories: parallel,continuous,centralized,and cross patterns.Thirdly,starting from the structural characteristics of each type of pattern,the thesis identifies the key and auxiliary information in sentences.Fourthly,this study summarizes the Chinese-English translation process of the four thematic progression patterns in the original text.This thesis has the following two research findings.Firstly,due to the discrepancies between Eastern and Western thinking modes and the differences in the English and Chinese theme-rheme structures,the thematic progression patterns of English economic report texts are greatly influenced by the grammatical structure of the original text,while those of Chinese economic report texts are the opposite.In view of several different thematic progression patterns in the original text,the translator,according to the characteristics of Chinese expression,appropriately adopts the following three translation methods: the method of adding,especially the addition of conjunctions,should be used;the method of omitting is adopted to eliminate the repetitively narrative part of the original text and enhance the simplicity of the translation;the method of rewriting,especially the verbalization of noun phrases,should be employed.Secondly,in the process of translating English economic report texts,the thematic progression pattern of the translated text sometimes needs to be consistent with that of the original text,but sometimes it needs to be properly transformed.The concrete explanations are as follows: when the original text adopts parallel pattern,the translated text should retain the parallel pattern as far as possible;when the original text uses continuous pattern,sometimes the original logic should be retained,and sometimes the translated text should be transformed into a parallel pattern;when the original text employs centralized pattern,the translated text sometimes maintains the original pattern,and sometimes the translated text is transformed into the parallel pattern;when the original text adopts cross pattern,the structure of translated text is flexible and it can be translated into parallel,centralized or cross patterns.From the perspective of textual cohesion and coherence,combining with the theme-rheme theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics,this thesis systematically explores the thematic progression patterns and their Chinese translation methods in the English economic report texts.This thesis applies linguistic theories to translation practice and it is hoped that some contributions can be made to the translation studies of economic report texts.