A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Texts And Their Translation

For a long time, sentences are always thought of as the largest unit of language. Although grammar which deals mainly with the structure of individual sentences has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to cohesion. However, we should recognize that not all sentences are interesting, relevant, or suitable and that one can not just put any sentence after another and hope that it will mean something. A sentence is not autonomous; it does not exist for its own sake but as part of a text. Thus the sentence is the highest rank of grammatical unit in grammar but it is also the basic linguistic unit constituting a text, which is a stretch of language, in many cases, longer than one sentence. Text linguistics or 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 to their users. Obviously, the rapid development of text linguistics, discourse analysis, semantics, and pragmatics, etc. has greatly enriched the theories of translation. With the development of translation theory, text has been regarded as the basic unit of translation. Thereupon, cohesion, one of the elementary components in text analysis, plays an important role intranslation.It is true that, as translators, we have to operate with lexical items and grammatical structures at various stages of the translation process. It is nevertheless imperative that we view the text as a whole both at the beginning and at the end of the process. The classification and analysis of cohesion made by Halliday and many Chinese linguists can help translators to comprehend the textual structure of source texts more accurately. Once the source text is understood, the translator has to tackle the task of producing a target version which should be accepted as a text in its own right. Acceptable collocational 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 and coherent text. One successful translated product should not only be faithful to the original meaning, but also skillful in the reconstruction of the structure of the version with cohesive devices suitable to the characteristics of the target language. The neglect of textual cohesion affects both production and comprehension of the translated version. In production, one can create a stretch of language in which every sentence, in isolation, is faultless, yet the overall text is either incoherent or inappropriate. The phraseology and grammatical pattern of the target version have conformed to target language norms, but the translation may still sound foreign or clumsy; it may not even make sense to the target language reader.Cohesion is one of the linguistic features of text and it, together with coherence in discourse, is the core of the study of text linguistics or discourse analysis. Then, similarly, in translation, we have to study the cohesion in the original text carefully, and then employ appropriate cohesive devices in the target language to reproduce an equally cohesive translation text. We have to study what available cohesive devices the source language and the target language have, and the differences between them, and then we can look for the appropriate ways of transference.Hence, the present paper attempts to discuss the distinctions of cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts and their application to literary translation with the adequate examples and the knowledge of text linguistics so as to compensate for the cultural and linguistic differentiations that cause the loss of meaning.