Abstract—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.
Index Terms—Thematic structure, “Daffodils,” Theme
distribution, poetry translation.
Zhu Siwei and Zhao Xueai are with the School of Foreign Studies, Northw
estern Polytechnical University, 1 Dongxiang Road, Chang'an District, Xi'an
Shaanxi, 710129, China (e-mail: mirandazhu_nwpu@163.com, xazhao@nwp
u.edu.cn).
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Cite:Zhu Siwei and Zhao Xueai, "A Comparative Study of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Its’ Chinese Translation from the Perspective of Thematic Structure," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 18-22, 2021.