A Comparison Of Personal References In English And Chinese

Nowadays translation studies have taken a cultural turn, but we cannot ignore the fact that for a long time translation studies and practice have a deep relationship with contrastive linguistics, for language is the core of culture. Through contrastive analysis, the similarities between two languages can be seen, and as a result these similarities and differences will be helpful for the translators to produce translated texts of better quality.This thesis, based on the theory of coherence and cohesion put forward by Halliday and Hasan, as well as data-analysis, attempts to explore the differences in personal references between English and Chinese, and also to uncover the underlying cultural reasons for these differences, thus increasing the translator's awareness of the differences and improving the quality of translation.Part 1 gives a very brief account of the purpose, the methodology adopted and the general framework of the thesis.Part 2 reviews the relevant studies done by foreign and Chinese scholars. In order to pave the way for the actual analysis of personal references in the English and Chinese texts, this part is also devoted to revisiting the coherence and cohesion theory put forward by Halliday and Hansan.Part 3 is the data presentation and analysis, containing some notes on the data and the statistics. In this part, the criteria for choosing the samples in the study and the methodology adopted are presented in details. Adopting scientific statistics is an important try of this thesis. Some of the former studies only listed the data of the samples and qualitative studies were the major study. This thesis adopts the empirical method, studies the mean value and variance, thus illustrating thedifferences in personal references in English and Chinese.Part 4 is the discussions of the results, including typical examples taken from the samples as well as an exploration into cultural reasons behind these differences.Part 5 is the concluding remarks. Based on the findings drawn from the analysis of data, a tentative conclusion is reached that the third personal references and the possessive pronouns are used differently in English and Chinese, while there is no significant difference in the use of other personal references. So the recognition of the differences in personal references between English and Chinese is helpful for translators to improve the quality of translations.