Differences Of Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Texts And The Translation Strategies Involved

Cohesion and coherence have been of great concern in the linguistic and the translation circle since the establishment of cohesion theory in the nineteen seventies marked by the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English. Many linguists and scholars have been studying them and have tried to establish the relation between them and their importance in the creation of a text. Cohesion is seen as a necessary condition in text production and thus holds an important position in text translation. Translators' awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between the languages are crucial because they not only affect translators' understanding of the source text (ST) but also influence the quality of the target text (TT).With the development of discourse analysis and text translation studies, the coverage of cohesion has gradually expanded, and researchers are investigating the roles that cohesion plays in various fields, such as reading, writing, text type, stylistics and translation. Many are also conducting contrastive studies on English and Chinese cohesive devices and analyzing their significance in translation. But how to use the cohesive devices in the translating process is still in need of systematic discussion, and how the cohesive differences between the two languages affect translation strategies in the translation practice should be further combed and perfected. The author of this paper attempts to describe the cohesive differences between English and Chinese and systematically discusses translation strategies in accordance with the textual differences between the two languages.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 makes a brief review of the origin and development of cohesion theory, the relation between cohesion and text linguistics, and the relation between cohesion and text translation. It also accounts for the purpose and coverage of the study and the definitions of the terms involved.Chapter 2 reviews the studies on cohesion and introduces the concept of cohesion, its classification, and its relation to coherence, the extension of the theory made by Halliday and Hasan, Hu Zhuanglin, and Zhang Delu, as well as the relation between cohesion and text translation.Chapter 3 analyzes the differences in sentence and thematic structures between English and Chinese. The author holds that such differences between the two languages as hypatoxis vs. parataxis, subject-prominent vs. topic-prominent language, tree-type vs. bamboo-type sentence structure, and inanimate subject vs. animate subject followed by an animate verb are the roots of the differences in cohesive devices.Chapter 4 goes into a detailed contrastive study on various cohesive differences between English and Chinese: reference; substitution; ellipsis; conjunction; lexical cohesion; parallelism and co-structure; theme-rheme; mood, tense and aspect; the cohesive force of punctuation and its management in translation as well. The aim is to analyze the specific differences and seek effective means of transformation from English to Chinese.Chapter 5 attempts to probe into the translation strategies concerning the effective management of cohesive devices and the recurrence of cohesive relation on the basis of the contrastive analysis in the previous chapters.Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a tentative summary of the maneuverable principles that involve cohesion in the hope of offering some reference in translation from English to Chinese.Given the wide range of cohesion and the limited length of this thesis, and the author's insufficient data for reference, this paper has only touched the tip of the iceberg. Any subdivision that has been included here is worthy of a further in-depth study or discussion.