A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In Classical Chinese And Its English Translation

Since the 1990 s, translation theorists in China and other countries start to bring text linguistics into the research of translation. Cohesion theory is the center of text linguistics, so cohesion translation naturally attracts the translation theorists’ attention that there are a great number of researches into this topic. However, much of the research is on contrastive analysis between modern Chinese and English thus neglects that between classical Chinese and English. We can hardly find an article about cohesion translation from classical Chinese to English. Difference between modern Chinese and English is much obvious, not to mention that between classical Chinese and English. To translate cohesion in classical Chinese into English is quite a complicated thing, so to deal with the cohesive devices in the source text requires the translator to master the language differences between classical Chinese and English.Translation is a practical act, so that simple comparison between these two languages won’t contribute to know cohesion differences between them. To handle this problem, this thesis selects altogether four famous classical Chinese essays: Shi Zhong Shan Ji by Su Shi, Tao Hua Yuan Ji by Tao Yuanming, Yue Yang Lou Ji by Fan Zhongyan and Zui Weng Ting Ji by Ouyang Xiu and of each essay there are two translated versions: one by Luo Jingguo, another by a foreign scholar of Chinese.The thesis analyzes each two translated versions and compares them with the source text aiming to find out the strategies of cohesion translation and to provide some experience for translation from classical Chinese into English in the future.The thesis is composed of five chapters: the first chapter acts as an introduction which introduces the background, objectives, methodologies, significance and also limitations of the study; chapter two is literature review retrospecting the researches of text linguistics in the past few years, cohesion theory and cohesion translation at home and abroad in the past,;chapter three is the theoretic basis of the thesis which illustrates Halliday and Hasan’s theory of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion; chapter four, on the basis of chapter three, makes a comparisonand analysis between each two translated versions and between the translated version and the source texts to find out the strategies of cohesion translation from classical Chinese to English; chapter five is the conclusion of the study, which demonstrates cohesion translation strategies from classical Chinese to English. What’s more, it points out the limitations of the study and expresses the author’s wishes to improve research ability in the future.