Comparison And Translation Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices Between English And Chinese

Nowadays, the focus of linguistic study has been shifted from the level of sentence to text and thus text linguistics has got great improvement. Inspired by text linguistics, people believe that translation studies should be carried out with text as the unit.As one of the important ties in composing a text, cohesion accordingly has begun to won attention from linguists, among whom M.A.K.Halliday makes the greatest contribution to the construction of cohesion theory. In Cohesion in English, he divides the cohesive devices in English into five categories including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and provides detailed explanation. Owing to its great explanatory power for cohesion, Halliday's theory has won widespread acceptance. In China, it is applied by scholars in researches of Chinese and makes some contribution.On the basis of the research achievements of the past and current linguists, this thesis demonstrates the similarities and differences in grammatical cohesive devices between English and Chinese since cohesion is an indispensable element for a translator to handle in the process of translation. Consequently, the application of the contrastive study to translation between English and Chinese is analyzed. Taking into consideration the cohesive differences, a translator should comprehend the cohesive devices in the source text and make appropriate adjustments according to the norm of the target language and produce a cohesive and coherent text acceptable for the target readers.