Linguistic Explorations in Translation Studies — Analyses of English Translations of Ancient Chinese Poems and Lyrics

Linguistic Explorations in Translation Studies provides an English translation of one of the first attempts made by a Chinese scholar to apply Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to translation studies. The original Chinese edition was published in 2006. This English edition includes a Preface written by the translators and an interview with Guowen Huang.

By offering a comprehensive analysis of ancient Chinese poems, this book successfully illustrates how different aspects of the SFL theory can help to illuminate translation as a meaning-making process and points out various choices in meaning in the ancient Chinese poems and their translations. The book is also innovative in its proposal of the six steps in applying SFL to translation, which include (i) observation, (ii) interpretation, (iii) description, (iv) analysis, (v) explanation and (vi) evaluation.

The book will be of interest to researchers and academics who work on SFL, translation studies, language sciences or related areas as well as MA or doctoral students who would like to study SFL.

Huang Guowen is Chair Professor of the Changjiang Programme selected by the Ministry of Education of P.R. China. He has been a professor of Functional Linguistics since 1996 at Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. China. He is now at City University of Macau.


Bo Wang is a researcher in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Yuanyi Ma is a researcher in the Faculty of Education at Vancouver Island University.