Comparison And Translation Of Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Business Text

As the development of the reform and opening and the economic globalization, business English has developed very fast. The analysis of the business text and translation of it have received more and more attention. Since the 1990s, many translation theorists have been applying text linguistics to translation studies because these two branches have a lot in common: the description of the context above sentence level. Cohesion, as one of the core linguistic features of text, has consequently been studied in the field of both linguistics and translation. On this account, the thesis attempts to study business translation from perspective of text analysis by comparing the cohesive devices and bringing forward their respective translation strategies.The previous contrastive studies on cohesive devices between English and Chinese are mainly based on the observation of literary works; the findings may not be applicable to the business text. And the traditional comparison is always a list of how many cohesive items each language contains, and little attention has been paid to the reasons which lead to different employing of the cohesive device in English and Chinese texts and the corresponding translation strategies. The aim of the thesis is to explore the application of cohesive devices in business text, and to expect the paper may have some enlightenment to the translator, second language learner and language teaching.The paper adopts a comprehensive research which comprises quantitative research and qualitative research and focuses on the contrastive study and the analysis of example. The paper first adopts the quantitative research in which a hypothesis is offered--there must be some similarities and dissimilarities between EBT and CBT and different cohesive devices have different degree of similarities and dissimilarities. Then some concrete methods are used to prove the hypothesis. During the process of proving, the qualitative research is adopted to conclude some reasons and translation strategies.Through the statistical analysis, we can come to following conclusions:1) The similarities of cohesive devices in EBT and CBT overweight the dissimilarities.2) Among the five cohesive devices, three of them are frequently employed, in the order of lexical cohesion, reference and conjunction. And ellipsis and substitution are less used.The thesis paper applies the translation theory and the cohesion theory in the research of the business text translation, which facilitates the translators to better understand the business original text and the target business text, and finally to realize the purpose of communication.