A Comparative Study Of The Cohesive Devices Employed In The Chinese And English Versions Of The Reports On The Work Of Government

This thesis is an attempt to discuss the difference of cohesive devices employed in the reports on the work of government between its Chinese and English versions in the hope of giving some help to the translation of political documents.The birth of cohesion theory was marked by the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hason, which was published in 1976. This theory has exercised profound influence on linguistics and translation circle. In the past several decades, cohesion theory has been of great importance in linguistic circle with the development of other linguistic branches such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics etc. It has been a hot topic in linguistic researches and applied to many fields and subjects. For example:the application of cohesive theory in advertisement and news report, the application of cohesive theory in translation. Cohesive links are of significance in the production of text and pose indispensable position in text translation.Generally speaking, English is a language that prefers hypotactic cohesive devices while Chinese prefers paratactic cohesive devices. English focuses on explicit cohesive marks while Chinese focuses on implicit cohesive marks. There are five types of cohesive devices, including:reference, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion. They are playing important roles in translation. Based on the research of cohesion theory and translation, this thesis is an attempt to discuss the application of cohesive devices in political documents and their translation in the hope of offering some help to the relevant field.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction of the research background, research purposes and the layout of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review, which introduces recent development of cohesion theory at home and abroad. In chapter three, the data collection and analysis of the thesis is included. In the following chapter, the use of cohesive devices in the two versions is deliberated in detail, with explicit exemplification. The last chapter is a summary of the thesis. In this chapter, the limitation and researching findings of the thesis are included and some perspectives are presented as for the future development of cohesion theory research.