A Contrastive Study Of Chinese-English Text Translation From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression

This dissertation is a contrastive study of Chinese and English devices of cohesion and coherence and thematic progression with a focus on their implications for Chinese-English translation. By analyzing the differences of the cohesive devices and thematic progression in the two languages, we prove that the appropriate transformation of thematic progression is an effective way to achieve the naturalness and acceptability of the target language text.A large number of researches have been done in the contrastive studies of translation between Chinese and English, but most of them have focused on the similarities between them and many scholars have attempted to put Chinese into the English framework or to describe the Chinese language from the theoretical perspective of English linguistics, which have proved to be of little use for the practice of translating between the two languages. In this paper, we analyze their unique features with a focus on their differences. In addition, we only discuss Chinese-English translation because this is where most difficulties lie for Chinese students.Cohesion and coherence are closely related to each other, the former being one of the effective ways to realize the latter in a text. There are two types of cohesive devices: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. For the purpose of this dissertation, we only discuss grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction), which has a close relationship with thematic progression. By analyzing plenty of C-E translations we find that the use of cohesive devices in the two languages is quite different because each language has its unique features: English is basically hypotactic while Chinese is paratactic. We also discuss how to make appropriate transformations of the cohesive devices in C-E translation. For instance, in C-E translating, repeated nouns are often translated into personal pronouns or even omitted when possible; the frequent use of subjectless Chinese clauses is translated...