A Cognitive Approach Towards Sentence-Internal Cataphora Translation From English Into Chinese

Van Hoek holds that in English there are three factors determining the selection of reference points and the effects of linear order are somewhat weak, however, and do not outweigh the combination of prominence and conceptual connectivity. The purpose of this thesis is to study the differences between English and Chinese cataphora and how to translate the English cataphora into Chinese. After we analyzed the examples selected from nine English short stories and their Chinese translation, we find that there is cataphora in Chinese and the linear word order does not play a decisive role in determining the selection of reference points, but the frequency of cataphora is much lower than that in English. Among those examples, a lot of forms of cataphora in English are changed into the forms of anaphora when translated into Chinese; otherwise, the co-reference relationship expressed in the original text will be lost in the target language. Therefore, in doing translation, we must pay close attention to the differences between English and Chinese cataphora. After we translate a cataphoric sentence from English into Chinese, we must check whether the co-reference relation still holds in the translated version. If it is lost in the target language, we must make proper adjustments in order to keep the co-reference relationship expressed in the original text. In this thesis, we put forward some strategies for translating English cataphora into Chinese: if the original co-reference relationship is lost when the form of Pronoun + Full Noun of English is kept in Chinese, the form can be changed into other forms including N + ?, N+N, N + P, ? + N, P + ? and P + P.