The Translation Of Cohesive Devices In English Versions Of Mao Zedong Poems

Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of translation theories world wide, and there are three noticeable trends in the field of translation studies:a)different research perspectives are adopted by different translation studies schools, among which the " Culture Studies School" occupies a prevailing position after the " Cultural Turn " in translation studies; b)the functional approach to translation studies becomes very popular; c)empirical and positivist studies, like the "Corpus-based Translation Studies" have been introduced into the field.Among these three major trends, the second trend employs the findings in functional grammar and text linguistics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and contrastive linguistics burst forth later to explore the issues related to translation. However, text linguistics and contrastive linguistics have manifold ramifications, not all of them are relevant to translation to the same extent, so, the present study will focus on the factors that made a text a " text ", i.e. the " textuality " of text, and on one factor only-" COHESION". Cohesion is one of the seven criteria of textuality besides coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertuextuality. When these criteria are violated, the text may sound unnatural and foreign. In other words, cohesive devices are semantic relations or ties organize and, to some extent, create a text and distinguish a text from a non-text. They help the text to achieve smoothness in form and coherence in content. Halliday and Hasan first proposed the cohesion theory and they classified them into five categories:reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion.Chinese scholars, like胡壮麟,张德禄,朱永生and so on, have made significant contributions. They argue that "transitivity", "co—structure and so on are cohesive devices too and they expand the notion and scope of cohesion to the largest. Moreover, cohesion theory has been applied in the studies of stylistics, writing and translation, etc. Its importance is not to be neglected by translator when translating, for each language has its own specific way of relating people, events and objects. Previous researches have already yielded some prominent fruition, but few are related to the translation of the cohesive devices of Chinese poemsBasing on the data collected from Mao Zedong Poems and its three English versions produced by different groups of translators and by starting from the abundant examples of the cohesive devices in Mao Zedong Poems, the present study explores the varieties of those cohesive devices and their translation systematically. Combined methods of qualitative research plus quantitative research, commonness plus individuality, macro point of view plus micro point of view, description plus explanation and so on are employed in the study. The theoretical model adopted is the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan and revised by胡壮麟and张德禄.It is proved that Mao Zedong Poems contains a variety of cohesive devices that can be explored under the revised framework of the cohesion theory. And the study found out that most of the cohesive devices of the original text are translated into English cohesive devices by the translators of all the three versions. Four translation strategies are shared by all of them, i.e., Retaining, Adding, Changing and Omitting. There are some obvious differences too. Different individual translator and different translator groups have their preferences. For example, the co-translated version in1976 like to restructure the cohesive devices of the original text according to the character of English language.许渊冲is most likely to retain the original cohesive devices while黄龙is more inclined to change or omit them.When the descriptions are made, explanations have been offered from three major aspects in the present study. First of all, translator's ethics(responsibility) and competence have their influences on the translation of cohesive devices. Second, linguistic differences, especially the paratactic and hypotactic differences between the two languages determine that when translating, most of the cohesive devices in Mao Zedong Poems have to be retained or changed into other cohesive devices. More devices have to be added due to the grammatical and textual requirements of English. Last, the holistic and subjective thinking patterns of the Chinese people and the logical and objective thinking patterns of the English speaking nation determine the different preferences for the cohesive devices in the two languages and finally influence the translator's choice in translating them from one into another.