earticle

영어

Drawing on the concept of thematic progression based on Daneš (1974) and Zhu’s (1995) classification, this paper quantitatively compares the thematic progressions in the literary work ‘The True Story of Ah Q’ and its 21 Korean translations, to demonstrate how Chinese in the original and Korean in translations achieve textual equivalence in terms of cohesion. The theme, what the text is talking about, and the rheme, the development of the theme, maintain the cohesion of the text through thematic progression. The data analysis reveals that thematic progression patterns and their shifts in translation pertain to certain regularities in their frequency. In the original work, the Chinese language mainly uses ‘TP with a constant theme’, ‘simple linear TP’ and ‘TP with a constant rheme’ to organize the text, while the Korean translations also use ‘TP with derived theme’ and ‘TP with split rheme’ to organize the discourses. It is fair to say the Korean translations use a richer thematic progression than the original work. It highlights the fact that translators will generally follow the thematic progression of the original text in the process of the translation, but they also use additional thematic progressions in accordance with the Korean language to organize the texts.