Differences Between English And Chinese Grammatical Devices For Cohesion And Their Influences On English-Chinese Translation

AbstractFor a long time, sentence is always thought of as the largest unit of language.AIthough grarnmar which deals mainly with the structure of individual sentencesand is basically about how words are combined to form sentences has beenextensively studied, little attention is paid to cohesion until the middle of the l970sand, in particular, until the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in Englishin l976. However, we should recognize that not all sentences are interesting,relevant, or suitable and that one can not just put any sentence after another andhope that it will mean something. A sentence is not autonomous; it does not existfor its own sake but as part of a text. Thus the sentence is the highest rank ofgrammatical unit in grammar but it is also the basic linguistic unit constituting a tekt.which is a stretch of language, in many cases, longer than one sentence, in textlinguistics or discourse analysis which is about how sentences are combined to fOrmtexts or especially about how stretches of language, considered in their full textual,social. and psychologicaI context, become meaningfuI and unified for their users.Obviously, the rapid deveIopment of text linguistics or discourse ana1ysis, semantics,pragmatics, etc. has greatly enriched the theories of translation. The unit oftranslation has been extended from the sentence to the sentence groups, and the text.The criterion of translation has been changed from preserving the verbal beauty ofthe original text to achieving faithfulness to the content, language and style of theoriginal. The principle of translation has been changed from preserving the tbrm,namely stressing the order of words and sentences, of the original text to thetransference of the total meaning of the original text.lt is true that, as translators, we have to operate with lexica1 items andgrammatical structures at various stages of the translation process. 1t is neverthelessimperative that we view the text as a whole both at the beginning and at the end ofthe process. Once the source text is understood, the translator has to tackle the taskof producing a target version which can be accepted as a text in its own right.Acceptable collocationa1 patterns and grammatical structures can only enhance thereadability of individual sentences, but they do not in themselves ensure thatsentences and paragraphs add up to a readable or coherent text. Especially, when weread Chinese translations of English works, we may sometimes find that eachsentence in the ChineSe text is well written, but the whole translation does not readsmooth or even sounds strange. This is because, as the study of textual cohesion hasrevealed, textual cohesion has been neglected. The result of this neglect affeCts bothPrOduchon and processing of langUage. In Produchon one can creae a stretch oflM in Which PVPry sqpence, in isolato4 is faultiess, yPt the oveedl effect iseder theoherene or inaPproPriatenss. In PrOcessing one edfestS oneself in asensation: tha of UnderStanding every word and every conStrUhon in eachW sentence, bu still no undeStandin the WhOle. In bolatiOn it is shownlthe this: the pboeology and the coIlocational and graInInatical pattemin of theH version have conformed tO eqet-langUae nonns, bu even then thetalation may shll sound foreign or cltnnsy; worse still, it may not even makesense to the op readerCohesion is one of the lingulshc featUres of text and it, together with coherencein discourse, is the core of the StUdy of text linghstics or discourse analysis. Then,sbolarly in traIislation. we have tO StUdy the cohesion in the original tex carefiilly,and then emPloy aPpropriate cohesive devices in the taIget langUage to reproduCean equally cohesive translation tCXt. To achieve tha goal, we have tO ettind ourStUdy of tranSlation teclmiques used on the level of words and sentenes to the levelof tex. We have to StUdy What cohesthe devices the soure langUage and...