Grammatical Cohesion In The Translation Between English And Chinese

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. In other words, the essential purpose of language use is to communicate. But communication takes place not only among people of the same speech community, but also among people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Influenced by various factors, such as culture, mode of thought and so on, each language differs from others in the way of expression. Therefore, as a special kind of communication, translating should not be limited to the transference of the meaning of individual words or sentences.In recent years, text linguistics has got great improvement, because it does not restrict itself to the language per se, but rather relates to the real world, including the context of situation and the context of culture, as well as to the communicative function of the language, which complies with the ultimate purpose of translating. Inspired by text linguistics, people believe that translation studies should be carried out with text as the unit.Text is a semantic unit. Taking text as the unit of translation implies that in translating, what is transferred should be the meaning of the whole text instead of that of the linguistic structures such as the word, sentence or clause in that these are only the formal ways to realize meaning.As one of the important ties in composing a text, cohesion is a relation in which two or several elements which are structurally irrelevant to each other are joined together semantically. The interpretation of one element depends on that of other elements. The failure to understand the cohesive pattern of the source language as well as that of the target language is likely, to a large extent, to cause ambiguity or even misunderstanding.Hence, cohesion is an indispensable element for a translator to handle in theprocess of translation. Taking into consideration the cohesive differences, he should make appropriate adjustments according to the norm of the target language and produce a text that is cohesive and coherentThis paper is composed of four chapters: Chapter One is an introduction to the concept of text, texture and cohesion as well as to their respective functions in translation. Chapter Two covers a comparative survey of grammatical cohesive devices in English and Chinese and the influence of their differences on the translation between English and Chinese. In Chapter Three, some possible reasons for the distinctions in the cohesion use are explored from the angle of text genre and cultural backgrounds. Chapter Four is the conclusion.Because of the limitation of the author's knowledge and the pressure of time, this paper will only deal with the four grammatical cohesive devices identified by Halliday and Hasan in their book Cohesion in English (1976). Of course, there are other devices that are left untouched, whose use also contribute to the cohesion of a text, such as continuity of tense, consistency of style and punctuation. Therefore, this paper is only a preliminary study on the topic of cohesion and more work needs to be done in future.