Transitivity And Ecological Implications In Back To Country Life Ⅰ And Its English Translations

This thesis,based on the transitivity system in Systemic Functional Linguistics(hereafter referred to as SFL),explores the ecological implications in the pastoral poetry and their English translations from an eco-poetic perspective,taking the maintenance of transitivity system and ecological implications as the translation criteria.Over the past few decades,human society is facing a growing ecological crisis.Ecology is now at the forefront of research in a variety of disciplines.Ancient Chinese Poetry(hereafter referred to as ACP),including pastoral poetry in particular,reveals the profound ecological wisdom.Translating pastoral poems is of particular importance in light of the globalization of Chinese culture.Recent studies have investigated pastoral poetry by means of SFL.The majority of these studies,however,focus on the exploration and analysis of ecological implications of pastoral verse,and there are few comparative studies on the English translations of pastoral poetry.In light of this,this thesis investigates the ecological implications contained in Tao Yuanming’s pastoral poem Back to Country Life I and its three English versions,respectively from Wang Rongpei,Xu Yuanchong and Charles Budd,under the framework of transitivity.Its aim is to solve a research question: which translation is closer to the original poem Back to Country Life I? The following three sub-questions are addressed:(1)How is the transitivity system distributed in Tao’s Back to Country Life I?(2)What ecological implications are reflected in the poem Back to Country Life I?(3)Which of the three translations best captures the transitivity system and ecological implications of the original poem?As a way to answer the research question,this thesis,based on the transitivity theory,takes Tao’s Back to Country Life I as the research object to excavate its ecological implications from the perspective of eco-poetics.The first step of this thesis is to review the application of SFL and eco-poetics in translation studies of ACP,and to propose a means for conducting an analysis of pastoral poetry translations according to the maintenance of transitivity system and ecological implications.Then,it analyzes the transitivity system in Back to Country Life I and delves into the poem’s natural ecology,social ecology and spiritual ecology from an eco-poetic perspective.Additionally,the three English versions are also analyzed for the distribution and embodiment of the transitivity system and ecological implications.Finally,the three English versions are compared and examined,and a feasible approach of translation evaluation is investigated.It has a certain reference value for the translation of pastoral poems,which is based on preserving the transitivity system and taking into account the ecological implications.The following findings can be obtained from the research:(1)In terms of the distribution of transitivity system in the original poem,material and relational processes are equally distributed and these processes cover the largest proportion in the poem;In terms of the realization of the transitivity system in the three translations,the percentage of material process is highest,while the percentage of behavioral process is lowest.(2)In terms of the ecological implications contained in Tao Yuanming’s poem,it is found that the natural ecological perspective of harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature is mostly embodied in the personification and humanization of non-living entities,the perspective on social ecology of living in harmony with people and nature comes across in the descriptions of the poet’s surroundings,and the spiritual ecological perspective of being free from vulgarity is apparent in some emotional material action verbs he uses.The three translations differ in the realization of transitivity in terms of the choices of process types,participates and circumstantial elements.Among the three English versions,Wang’s translation preserves the natural ecology,social ecology and spiritual ecology of the source text.In conclusion,Wang’s version maintains the transitivity system distributed in the original and reproduces the ecological connotation more faithfully than the other two versions.This study,however,has several limitations that need to be addressed.For instance,this study only focuses on one representative pastoral poem and its three translations.Additional evidence demonstrating the applicability of this approach would require the selection of more poems of the same type for future research,and more translated texts in the contrastive study.