Two English Versions of “Changgan Xing”: a Systemic and Functional Linguistics Interpretation

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201127.069How to use a DOI?

Keywords

“Changgan Xing”, Systemic and Functional Linguistics, ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, textual metafunction

Abstract

From a Systemic Functional perspective, this paper made a comparison of the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of two translated versions of Li Bai’s “Changgan Xing”. Adopting Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this article first gave a clear description of the metafunctions depicted in the three different versions, and then analyzed the deviations in the translation versions from the source text, as well as the differences between the two translated versions. This study attempted to figure out the underlying causes from the perspective of contextual cues. A further qualitative analysis was done through detailed examinations of metafunctions presented in these texts. Results showed that in both of the translated versions, the verb process was more active, logical relations were more of Clause Simplex, Subject, Modality and Finite were applied more frequently, and additionally its Theme type was multiply various. In general, based on the well-formed descriptions and comparisons, it is argued that the translation by Arthur Waley is more loyal to the source text poem but without emotion well transferred, and without clearly showing the special wife-and-husband status in Chinese culture; on the contrary, the one by Pound is better performed in the translations of emotion and culture, though with more errors occurring. Contextual analysis of causes of their deviations reflects the specific time when Pound and Waley created their translations, as well as their understandings of Chinese culture.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Kejuan Cheng
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/11/28
TI  - Two English Versions of “Changgan Xing”: a Systemic and Functional Linguistics Interpretation
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Education, Language and Inter-cultural Communication (ELIC 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 339
EP  - 346
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201127.069
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201127.069
ID  - Cheng2020
ER  -