AUTHOR=Liu Qiannan , Li Xiaolong 

TITLE=Reproducing experiential meaning in translation: A systemic functional linguistics analysis on translating ancient Chinese poetry and prose in political texts

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1029187

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1029187

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=This research, drawing on insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics, comparatively analyzed the transitivity patterns of ancient Chinese poetry and prose (ACPP) and their translations, quoted in the three volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, to explore how the ACPP’s experiential meaning was conveyed in the English translations of political texts. Statistics showed that the translations are prone to reproducing the experiential meaning such that it involves more representations of the flow of events and the creation of relationships among entities, focusing more on construing experience of the physical world rather than personal emotions, feelings, or cognition. Besides, the target text is also inclined to simplify the experiential meaning by compressing and omitting unnecessary transitivity processes and the participant and circumstance nominalization. This research found the factors responsible for such tendencies include the features of political texts, language differences, the distribution of process types, the delicacy of the transitivity system and register variations of fields of activity. With these findings, the study is expected to contribute to the SFL approach of studying literary translation in non-literary texts from the angle of experiential meaning and offer guidance to the translation of political literature with ACPP.