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A Comparative Study of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Its’ Chinese Translation from the Perspective of Thematic Structure

This study analyzed the thematic structures of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and its Chinese version by Fei Bai to compare the theme distributions and their markedness in the original and Chinese versions of the poem. Results showed that the number of simple themes in the translated version was significantly higher than in Wordsworth’s original version. Conversely, Wordsworth’s version had more marked themes than Fei Bai’s version. This study then explored potential reasons for the different thematic structures in the two versions. The percentage of simple themes in Fei Bai’s version was higher than that in the original version because Chinese does not have a clausal theme, so translators would more frequently use simple themes. Additionally, Wordsworth’s original version reflected a higher percentage of marked themes than Fei Bai’s Chinese version because native English writers prefer to use juxtaposed phrases and clauses. These results provide theoretical insights on employing the linguistic perspective to compare English poems and their Chinese translations.