Pre-systemic Foundations for Translation Studies
Readings Informing Systemic Functional Linguistics
Edited by
Bo Wang [+–]
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau
Bo Wang received his doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include systemic functional linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis, and language description. He is co-author of Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (Routledge), Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (Routledge) and Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (Springer). He is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Macau, China.
Yuanyi Ma [+–]
Yuanyi Ma received her doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include systemic functional linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis, and language description. She is co-author of Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (Routledge), Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (Routledge) and Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (Springer). She is an independent researcher in China.
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen [+–]
University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 160 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of International Business and Economics,
Beijing, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Before this, he was Chair Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor in the Linguistics Department of Macquarie University. Professor Matthiessen has worked in areas as diverse as language typology, linguistics and computing, grammatical descriptions of various languages, grammar and discourse, healthcare communication studies, functional grammar for English-language teachers, text analysis and translation, multisemiotic studies, and the evolution of language. He has supervised over 40 research students.
Beijing, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Before this, he was Chair Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor in the Linguistics Department of Macquarie University. Professor Matthiessen has worked in areas as diverse as language typology, linguistics and computing, grammatical descriptions of various languages, grammar and discourse, healthcare communication studies, functional grammar for English-language teachers, text analysis and translation, multisemiotic studies, and the evolution of language. He has supervised over 40 research students.
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been concerned with translation studies since its beginning. However, such interest in translation can be traced to the early phase of SFL, i.e. “scale-&-category theory”, and even to Firthian linguistics that fed into the development of SFL as well as Malinowski’s empirical field work in the Trobriand Islands. As a collection of papers that represent early engagement with translation studies before the development of SFL, this book includes four parts, covering the studies by (i) Bronisław Malinwoski and J.R. Firth, (ii) M.A.K. Halliday, (iii) J.C. Catford and (iv) Jean Ure and Jeffrey Ellis. Part I includes works by Bronisław Malinowski and J.R. Firth, who have laid the foundations for Halliday’s SFL. Part II documents Halliday’s three papers: two papers focus on his machine translation project started in the mid-1950s led by Margaret Masterman, and one paper by Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) highlights the significance of rank scale in translation studies and discuss the relevance of translation in the context of language education. Part III collects two chapters by J.C. Catford, who examines the significance of translation equivalence and translation shift and locates translation studies within a general linguistic framework informed by Halliday’s scale-&-category theory. In Part IV, the works by Jean Ure and Jeffrey Ellis also apply scale-&-category theory, the precursor of SFL, to compare the source text and the target text in translation, locating translation as a domain within comparative descriptive linguistics.
