An investigation into mental process in nam cao’s short stories and its manifestation in the English translational version

Abstract

This descriptive study aims to examine the mental process in Nam Cao’s Short Stories and its manifestation in the English translational version based on the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) by Halliday (2004). The study analyzed 400 samples of mental process collected from Nam Cao’s 9 short stories and 400 samples from the English translational version to find out the similarities and differences of mental processes in the Vietnamese source text (ST) and the manifestation in the translational version in the English target text (TT). The study reveals, in terms of the logico-semantics that the similarity was recognized in the dependency of the clauses in clause complex with the projection where both ST and TT had types of reporting of thoughts. Syntactically, in terms of the taxis, both Vietnamese ST and English TT were found with sentences or clause complex containing clauses realizing the dependency in the linking. As for the differences between the two languages in the employment of the linguistic resources for encoding the Mental Processes, the study shows a slight imbalance in rendering the mental process in ST to TT where other kinds of process were found to manifest the mental meaning in Nam Cao’s short stories. The differences in terms of logico-semantics can be recognized with the instances of shifting in projection where Verbal Quoting with locution, Reporting Idea, Reporting Idea with parataxis in ST were found to be rendered into TT respectively as Quoting thought with Perception, Verbal quoting, Reporting Idea with hypotaxis. With regard to the syntactic differences, instances of shifting between subject and object in ST and TT were found frequent with the case of shifting from active voice in ST to passive voice in TT. Precisely, Senser coded as Subject (ST) was shifted to Phenomenon coded as Subject (TT) and Senser coded as Object to Phenomenon coded as Object in the process of emotion. These findings about the similarities