A Study Of Cohesion Translation Of The Border Town

Since the 1990s, many Western and Chinese translation theorists have been applying text linguistics to translation studies because those two branches have a lot in common. The objects of their studies are living languages in culture-loaded communication; the description of the context above the sentence level is attached great importance in both fields. Under most circumstances, what we translate is a text, and the result of translation is also a text. Cohesion is one part that makes great contributions to the establishment of a discourse. This thesis attempts to study how to reproduce cohesion in target language when we translate a Chinese novel into English by analyzing the cohesion in the two English versions of the Border Town(one is translated by Glades Yang, and another is by Ching Ti and Robert Payne).Through contrastive studies of the differences of cohesion between the two English versions and between the translation and Chinese, this thesis attempts to throw a new light on cohesion shift between English and Chinese. In such contrastive studies, reference, lexical cohesion, sentence link and some other linguistic concepts including culture and style, are employed. The thesis intends to illustrate that cohesion is an essential part in a text which must be reproduced in text translation. In the reproduction the translator may not necessarily draw upon the original cohesion pattern. In many cases he must make necessary modifications in order to produce a cohesion pattern functionally correspondent to the original text. Such modifications are necessitated by the contrasts between English and Chinese in cohesion.The thesis consists of four chapters besides introduction and conclusion. The introduction briefly states the necessity or the significance of the researches that result in this thesis. Chapter One discusses the notion of reference, which is the basic element in cohesion. After its definitions are given, the thesis makes a statistical comparison between the two versions in term of personal reference and demonstrative reference, based on which the rules of reference translation are drawn.Chapter Two presents contrastive studies between Chinese and English in lexical...