A Comparative Study On Textual Cohesive Devices Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre

Since the 1990s, many a translation theorist, both at home and abroad, has been applying text linguistics to translation studies in respect that these two branches have a lot in common: the description of the context above sentence level is attached great importance to in both fields, which is quite different from the traditional linguistic model of translation studies evaluating translation only at lexical or sentential level. Linguists regard text as a unit of translation and plenty of researches have been done on cohesion. Text linguistics has provided a new perspective for translation study. As the core of text linguistics, cohesion theory is applied by many translators from both home and abroad, and many articles and books discuss the cohesion in translation from different perspectives, but most of which are confined only to a certain kind of cohesion device, a comprehensive and systematic study on the contextual cohesive devices of the translation for a literary novel is rare.With the development of text linguistics, there are a variety of opinions on the understanding and classification of cohesive devices by linguists, among whom, the British well-known linguists Halliday and Hasan have made the greatest contribution to cohesion theory. In 1976, in their co-worked publication Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan divided the cohesive devices in English into five categories—reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, and provided detailed explanation. Owing to its great explanatory power for cohesion, Halliday and Hasan's theory has won widespread acceptance.Due to the similarities and differences existing in the textual cohesive devices in English and Chinese, the handling of the cohesive devices in translation between English and Chinese is rather complex, which have a direct influence on the quality of translation. Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, this thesis does a systematic comparative study on the three versions of Jane Eyre from the perspective of textual cohesive devices, in the hope of demonstrating and testing the feasibility and significance of textual cohesive devices in translation.Five chapters are included in the present thesis. In the first chapter, introduction, significance, method of the study, and also the organization of the thesis are put forward. Chapter two is a literature review, concerning an overview on text linguistics, text and translation, and the related studies on the translation of Jane Eyre. Chapter three provides the theoretical foundation, including the importance of cohesion in translation, the concepts and classifications of cohesion, and a general contrastive study of the textual cohesive devices in English and Chinese. Chapter four is to contrast the specific translation texts, it makes a dedicate analysis of the three Chinese versions in terms of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion. Chapter five is the conclusion.In a word, the thesis takes the classical English novel Jane Eyre and its three Chinese versions as the studying objects, through the combination of theoretical elaboration and practical study of translated versions, it attempts to observe the differences of cohesion between the three Chinese versions and between the translated versions and English, and analyzes the comprehensions of cohesion and application of translation skills of different translators. By the comparative study, it sums up the impacts or possible issues to the translations due to the differences of cohesion between English and Chinese and puts forward the practical solutions to them, aiming at demonstrating the significance of cohesive devices in translation and providing some guidance on the English-Chinese translation of a literary novel.