Blurb:

Following the concept of translation as re-instantiation, this chapter investigates how verbal projection in a Buddhist text written in literary Chinese (1291) is re-instantiated in four English translations (1930, 1977, 1998 and 2011). More specifically, it looks into the actual manifestations of verbal projection in the source text and its English translations, and examines what part of the systemic potential is instantiated and re-instantiated, and for what consideration. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to expand the application of systemic functional linguistics to the translation of literary Chinese, a language that was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early twentieth century.