Study Of The English Translation Of To Live From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Theory

Thematic progression(hereinafter referred as TP)is an important theory in the field of linguistics,and translation studies based on TP theory are emerging in an endless stream.The concepts of theme and rheme were first put forward by the Prague School,and then developed by the Systemic Function School represented by Halliday.From then on,the research of theme and rheme has been raised to the textual level.As an important way to achieve textual cohesion and semantic coherence,TP reflects the organization and development of the textual information,and can help translators better understand the layout and writing style of the text.Therefore,it can provide guidance to translation practice to a certain extent.Yu Hua’s To Live has achieved great success in China since its publication in 1993.Michael Berry’ s translation of To Live has received great praises abroad as well.The National Endowment for the Arts included the English version of To Live in its The Big Read program,which is one of the only two selected translations.Most previous translation studies based on TP have focused on pragmatic texts such as news,politics texts and scientific and technological texts,and few on literary texts.This thesis focuses on Michael Berry’s translation of To Live and discusses: firstly,the distribution of TP pattern of the original text of To Live and its English translation and their characteristics.Secondly,how does the translator make the target readers better understand the characteristics of the source language and the writing style of the original work through retaining the information structure of the ST.Thirdly,the problems of translation equivalence and translation shift in ST and TT based on thematic progression theory.Corpus-based approach and qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted in this research.Based on the source text(ST)and target text(TT)of To Live(a total of 871 segments),a bilingual parallel corpus is built,which covers 86205 Chinese characters and 69361 English words.Based on Xu Shenghuan’s classification of TP patterns,every segment in the parallel corpus is marked to determine its TP patterns.Then,the consistency and deviation in TP pattern of the ST and TT are marked,and finally the relevant data counted.According to the statistics,the parallel TP pattern holds the dominant role among the four types of TP pattern in the ST,accounting for about 45.69%.The main TP pattern in the TT is also parallel TP pattern.And the consistency of TP pattern between the ST and TT has reached89.32%.It is found that,firstly,the language expression and information promotion mode in the ST are consistent with those of the TT,realizing the equivalence of content and form,thus retaining the narrative style and language characteristics of the ST to a certain extent and reducing the deviation from the ST.Secondly,owing to the differences in grammar and expression between English and Chinese,some TP patterns cannot be retained.Therefore,the translator needs to adjust the TP pattern according to the stylistic characteristics and grammatic rules of the target language,so as to achieve textual cohesion and semantic coherence.To sum up,in the process of translation,the translator could analyze the thematic structure and TP pattern of the ST,and reach equivalence of content and form between the TT and the ST from a new perspective,and improve the cohesion and coherence of the translation to a certain extent.