Management Of The Formal Cohesive Mechanisms And Cohesion As Relations Of Textual Meaning In English-Chinese Translation

Discourse analysis has been developing rapidly since 1970s. Discourse analysis studies language in use, its aim is to come to a much better understanding of how various discourses work in the communication of the real world; discourse analysis is about how sentences are combined to form texts or especially about how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users. Cohesion and coherence are the center which discourse analysis revolves about, and which are also the vital elements concerned in translation. It is the same matter of common concern with the two different subjects that makes the application of discourse analysis in translation not only possible and feasible but also valuable. Obviously, the rapid development of discourse analysis has greatly enriched the theories of translation. The unit of translation 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 of the original text to achieving faithfulness to the context, language and style of the original. The principle of translation has been changed from preserving the form, namely stressing the order of words and sentences, of the original text to the transference of the total meaning of the original text.At various stages of the translating process, it is imperative that the translator view the text as a whole both at the beginning and at the end of the process. Once the source text is understood, the translator has to tackle the task of producing a target version which can be accepted as a text in its own right. Acceptable collocation patterns and grammatical structures can only enhance the readability of individual sentences, but they do not in themselves ensure that sentences and paragraphs add up to a readable or coherent text. This is because the translator has to study what cohesive devices the source language and the target language have available, and the differences between them, and then he can look for the appropriate ways of transference.The present paper explicitly shows the necessity of differentiating cohesion asrelations of textual meaning and the formal mechanisms that realize the cohesion. It discusses the contributions to the theory of cohesion made by Halliday & Hasan (1985) and Hu Zhuanglin (1994), as well as the existing problems in the theory. On the basis of the basic functions of cohesion, it further expands the scope of cohesion and equates it with the textual meaning that links clauses and the units above the clause. Cohesion is not only textual meaning that organizes meaning realized by formal features within language, but also textual meaning that connects the text with the context of situation. In this sense, cohesion is the textual meaning that expresses the semantic relations linking the clauses and units larger than the clause, and relations linking the text with the context of situation. In this way, the difference between cohesion and coherence is that the former is the concrete semantic relations of the text and the latter is the effect these relations produce.By analyzing and comparing plenty of typical examples, this thesis concentrates on the management of discourse cohesion realized by the formal mechanisms and the cohesion as textual meaning in English-Chinese translation. Our study shows that there are great differences not only between English and Chinese grammatical devices for cohesion, but also between relations of textual meanings which are clearly not a mere features of texts, but rather the outcome of cognitive processes among text users, and most of them should be readjusted in English-Chinese translation so that we may have a cohesive target language text. Then we have examined their influences on English-Chinese translation and tried to compare the cohesion realized by formal mechanisms with the cohesion as relations of textual meaning, and suggest such methods to cope with these differences in English...