A comparative study of Chinese and English discourse
Linguistic Explorations in Translation Studies - Analyses of English Translations of Ancient Chinese Poems and Lyrics - Guowen Huang
Guowen Huang [+ ]
City University of Macau
HUANG Guowen is Chair Professor of the Changjiang Programme selected by the Ministry of Education of P.R. China. He has been a professor of Functional Linguistics since 1996 at Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. China. He is now at City University of Macau. He was educated in Britain and received two PhD degrees from two British universities (1992: Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh; 1996, Functional Linguistics, Cardiff). He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2004-2005 at Stanford University. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal Foreign Languages in China (bimonthly) published by the Higher Education Press, China. He is also co-editor of the journal of Functional Linguistics (Springer) and co-editor of Journal of World Languages (Routledge). He publishes extensively both in China and abroad and serves/served as an editorial/advisory committee member for several journals, including Linguistics and the Human Sciences (Equinox), Language Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Applied Linguistics (Equinox), and Social Semiotics (Carfax). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Monograph Series Discussions in Functional Approaches to Language (Equinox). His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies.
Description
In Chapter 7, we carry out a functional discourse analysis of Fu Rong Lou Song Xin Jian (芙蓉 楼送辛渐) by WANG Changling (王昌龄) and its English translations in the perspectives of cohesion, logico-semantic relation, thematic structure, and information focus. The analysis reveals that in terms of cohesion, the original in Chinese and its English translations vary significantly. Moreover, in terms of logico-semantic relation, thematic structure, and information focus, the original poem is very similar to its English translations. After comparing Chinese and English discourse, our analysis sheds light on the contrastive studies between English and Chinese as well as on translation studies.