A Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices In Information Structure Of English And Chinese Legislative Texts

In modern times, legal translation is gaining more and more importance, especially translation of legislative texts. The distinctive quality of legal texts and quality of legal translation make legal translators have to cope with problems that are different from those encountered in other sectors.It is generally admitted that textual cohesion is a universal phenomenon, regardless of the language. But since English and Chinese belong to two different language families, there inevitably exist many differences in cohesive devices. A device in one language does not necessarily exist in another or take a different form in another language. Even though many linguists at home and abroad have made great progress on the issue of cohesion, few are specified on that of legislative texts, let alone the comparison between Chinese legislative texts and their English versions.With a view to providing legal translation theorists and practitioners as well as language learners with an insight of cohesive deices adopted in the information structure of legislative texts, the aim of the study is to make a contrast between cohesive devices of Chinese and English legislative texts.In this thesis, Chinese legislative texts and their English versions have been drawn from a parallel corpus for legal discourse. With the cohesion theory and the information structure tree model proposed by researchers, the main cohesive devices in the information structure of legislative texts are identified, the similarities and differences between them are found out and their features are analyzed. Translators hopefully can make conscious adjustments in translation with the help of the results of the present study.