A Contextual Investigation of Chinese Translations of Detective Stories – Mismatched Holmes

Abstract

This study is carried out within the scope of the academic discipline of Translation Studies interfacing with Systemic Functional Linguistics. Different from comparative studies among different translations synchronically, this article adopts a diachronic perspective to compare two Chinese translations in the late nineteenth century and late twentieth century of Conan Doyle’s nine detective stories, with a view to identifying mismatches of verbal clauses in terms of three contextual parameters, i.e., field, tenor and mode. Drawing upon House’s scheme for translation quality assessment (1977; 1997) and the concept of instantiation in systemic functional linguistics, this article forms a model to investigate mismatches of verbal clauses in nine parallel texts and expand to the cline of subsystem based on the findings of the present corpus.