Shifts Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese-English Sight Translation

Cohesion is a significant concept to ensure that a text is a unified whole unit of language to ensure that the text can be understood in a coherent way and avoid miscomprehension,in which cohesive devices play a crucial role.To probe into the shifts of cohesive devices in Chinese to English sight translation,this study focuses on analyzing interpreting trainees’ grasp of cohesive devices so as to find some insights on enhancing their interpreting performance through the use of cohesive devices.In the experiment,12 students majoring in Chinese/English Interpreting in Beijing Foreign Studies University are invited to sight translate one speech selected from the book Xi Jinping:The Governance of China-the Visible Hand and the Invisible Hand.The model of cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan(1976&1985)is adopted in this thesis.Cohesive devices are categorized into grammatical devices(reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction)and lexical devices(reiteration and collocation)to analyze the source text(ST),the shifts made in the target text of the interpreting trainees’ sight translation(TT)and the official translated text(OT).The study found out that,most of the cohesive devices are retained as the same in the ST,which is especially prominent in the categories of substitution,additive conjunctives and adversative conjunctives.However,only a few are retained in ellipsis,as they are mostly shifted by means of reference or conjunction.In addition,the shifts occurring in the TT and OT do not differ significantly,with similar distributions of the types and frequencies of shifts.The most prominent type of shifts is the omission of a cohesive device both in the TT and the OTT.Some shifts reflect language-specific preferences of cohesive devices in different languages.Nevertheless,the TT has a larger number of retained cohesive devices while the OT shows greater tendency of shifting or omitting them.Also,the OT makes more shifts in sentence structure than the TT.This paper not only carries implications for the application of cohesion theory in translation studies,but also practically sheds light on Chinese-English sight translation and English language teaching.