A Translation Quality Assessment Of "Mulan Ci" From The Perspective Of The Three Metafunctions

The appropriate translation of the Chinese classics is of great significance for promoting outstanding Chinese literary works and Chinese culture going global.The English translation of Chinese poetry is an indispensable part of it.As a widespread narrative ballad created in the Northern Dynasties(386-581 A.D.),“Mulan Ci”(“The Ballad of Mulan”)has attracted increasing attention in the field of translation.So far,27 translated versions of this ballad have been published at home and abroad.Moreover,its popularity is further promoted by the movie,Mulan(1998,2020),produced by The Walt Disney Company.This Chinese ballad is also well-known for the story and spirits of the main character,Mulan,playing an important role in cultural inheritance and innovation.However,the translation studies of this ballad are relatively insufficient.This thesis adopts “Mulan Ci” and its four influential English versions,translated by Waley(1923),Frankel(1976),Xu(1988),and Wang(1998),as the research objects,and evaluates their translation quality from the perspective of the three metafunctions of language.Since M.A.K.Halliday established Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)in the 1960 s,it is developed into an influential linguistic theory.Halliday(1994/2000: F39)holds that all the specific functions language is designed to fulfill can be generalized into three fundamental functions,which are named metafunctions.Each function makes up a strand in the overall meaning in language and three strands of meanings are thus established,including the ideational meaning,the interpersonal meaning,and the textual meaning.Each of them is realized by different systems and serves as an inseparable aspect of meanings of language.Based on the theory of Halliday(2004,2014),the thesis compares and analyzes the four versions from the micro level that focuses on the context of situation,that is,to examine the equivalence in terms of three strands of meanings through the lexicogrammatical analyses in transitivity,Mood,modality,Theme choice,cohesive devices,and logico-semantic relations.In addition,the macro level focuses on the context of culture such as social and cultural background,historical tradition,mode of thinking and behavior,values,social and individual psychology.It serves as a supplement to the evaluation and runs through the analysis of the context of situation to derive a better understanding of the deviations in the translation and obtain an objective conclusion.In the analysis,the use of corpus tool,Ant Conc,is helpful to the efficiency and accuracy of the relevant data through consulting the concordance hits,frequency,clusters,and so on of the POS Tags that symbolize the certain meaning of language.Through the study,the major findings are as follows: each of the four versions has advantages in the equivalence with the original text in terms of the three metafunctions of language and reproduces its context of culture to some extent.Waley’s version tries to reproduce the original text as much as possible in detail,so the narration is more specific,outstanding in reproducing the textual meaning of the original ballad.Frankel’s version conforms to the original text to the greatest extent in the aspect of the experiential and textual meanings,which are relatively close to the original ballad.Xu’s and Wang’s versions extraordinarily reproduce the features of the original ballad in the interpersonal and logical meanings with a more accurate translation of the culture-loaded expressions.The thesis is expected to further prove that the perspective of the three metafunctions of language is an effective and a feasible way for translation quality assessment.It is hoped that this thesis will help objectively evaluate the degree of deviation or equivalence of the translation through discovering and comparing the linguistic features of the ballad and the selected English versions with the analyses of the contexts of situation and culture.In addition,it is also hoped that the thesis can promote the studies on translation quality assessment of Chinese ancient poetry,and contribute to producing better-translated versions of “Mulan Ci” in the future or optimizing the existing ones.