Toolan discussed narrative progression in the short story by a corpus stylistic approach and proposed core signalling of four narrative parameters, but he did not fully consider the time factor in the text. This study tries to apply the core signalling to the English translation of a non-linear Chinese story and discovers that the degree of the roles played by the four narrative parameters for narrative progression varies in the translation. The reason is that low frequency of finite verbs plays a limited role in narrative progression, while it is the other way around for the other three narrative parameters. The situation is similar to the original Chinese story. Though there are some shifts, generally speaking, the narrative progression in English translation corresponds with the original work. The study finds that this is related to the type of the story. Non-linear short story means that the time in the story is non-linear, while verbs are usually related to time. So, in order to blur time in the narrative, the story used verbs less and depended on the other parameters more for narrative progression.
