An E-C Comparison Of Grammatical Cohesive Ties & The Application In Text Translation

The spring-up of textlinguistics in the past few decades and the functional grammar introduced by M.A.K. Halliday throw new light on the study of translation. As far as the unit of translation is concerned, a lot of new ideas are introduced. As the subject of most translation is the text in communicative situation, more research should be done on the analysis of texts.This paper probes into some similarities and differences between Chinese and English in their use of cohesive ties through a contrastive analysis of reference, substitution, and ellipsis in these two languages. English, known as a hypotactic language, tends to use more formal ties in a text, whereas Chinese, a paratactic language, achieves coherence largely through intangible semantic relations.With the similarities, the cohesive ties in the source text may be translated into the same kind in the target text while the differences, on the other hand, demand transformation from one kind to the other.