英语专业毕业论文 英汉语序对比及翻译中的语序调整(10)

英语专业翻译方向 毕业论文

3.1 Subject and predicate structure

3.1.1 Subjects in English and themes in Chinese

A complete sentence must consist of at least a subject and a predicate. Halliday pointed out that components of English sentences can be divided into not only subject and predicate according to grammatical function, but also theme and rhyme according to communicative function. “Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message” (Halliday 64), while rhyme is the development and description of the theme. In English, the theme is often the grammatical subject of a sentence. However, in most Chinese sentences, grammatical subjects are not themes of sentences, so it is more appropriate and convenient to regard Chinese subjects and predicates as themes and rhymes when analyzing Chinese sentences (Zhao 45). The

theme dominating the whole sentence is always placed at the beginning of sentences. Influenced by thinking pattern, English emphasizing on subjects tends to follow the basic SVO (subject--verb or predicative--object) sentence structure to describe actions of the subjects. Except elliptical sentences, all English sentences require subjects to avoid structural disorder. On the contrary, Chinese focusing on topics and information tends to use the theme and rhyme structure. In a Chinese sentence, the theme which dominates the whole sentence is placed at the beginning of the sentence and followed by comments or explanations. Subjects of Chinese sentences can often be omitted. As we can see, different English and Chinese sentence structures result in different word orders. In some cases, because of the different subject–predicate collocations between the two languages, the theme of a Chinese sentence is not the subject of its translated English version. Thus, when doing translation, we should figure out the corresponding relationship between the theme of a Chinese sentence and the subject of an English sentence and change word order if necessary. For instance,

9月1号开学。

百度搜索“77cn”或“免费范文网”即可找到本站免费阅读全部范文。收藏本站方便下次阅读，免费范文网，提供经典小说教育文库英语专业毕业论文 英汉语序对比及翻译中的语序调整(10)在线全文阅读。