A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In English And Chinese News Texts And Their Translation

It is a universal phenomenon to make contrasts between different people and different things in nature. It is the same when it comes to the contrast between languages. In the 1960s, contrastive linguistics made a breakthrough study at the sentence level and extended to the text level. As a way of holding a text together, cohesion has become the basis for understanding a text. Cohesive devices make language concise, information prominent and logic clear. Thus the cohesion theory has been used in the contrastive analysis of various kinds of texts.As one type of text, news reports have their own language features. For example, at the lexical level, accurate, concise and popular words are used in news articles. At the grammatical level, for the requirement of timeliness of information, relatively simple rhetoric and syntax are adopted in news reports. At the structural level, various cohesive devices are employed in news texts. These cohesive devices play an important role in the formation of the whole text. Under the guidance of M. A. K. Halliday & Hasan's cohesion theory, the author carries out a contrastive study on cohesion in English and Chinese news texts. Through detailed analysis of a large collection of data, the thesis mainly discusses the differences of cohesive devices between English and Chinese news reports, and attempts to enrich translation theory and practice from the perspective of cohesion.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter introduces the theoretical background, the significance of the study, the layout of the thesis and possible contributions from the study. The second chapter first reviews the cohesion theory and gives a detailed illustration of the linguistic theory. It discusses several aspects of the cohesion theory, such as the definition and classification of cohesion, different viewpoints illustrated by linguists, and the relationship between cohesion and coherence. Language features in news reports are also introduced in this chapter. The third chapter is an empirical study, which begins with the introduction of data collection. Then statistical research and analysis is applied to the data collected, from which the author summarizes the similarities and differences of the cohesive devices between English and Chinese news texts. Possible reasons for these differences are explored from the linguistic aspect. Based on the contrastive study of cohesion in English and Chinese news reports, the fourth chapter applies the contrastive analysis of cohesion to news translation. Then translation strategies are brought forward with examples. Finally, the conclusion clarifies the limitations of this thesis and offers some suggestions for further study.From the contrastive study, the author concludes that cohesive devices in English and Chinese news texts do not correspond to each other. Therefore, the author offers five translation strategies that are most useful: literal translation, replacement, conversion, omission and amplification. These strategies, on the one hand, can guarantee the information integrality during the process of translation; and on the other hand, they can make the target language readers understand the content more easily.The practical value of the thesis lies in:(1) Such a contrastive study helps the translator better understand the structural features of the source text and retain the cohesive relation in the target text.(2) The study, to a certain degree, is helpful for the refinement of translation, which ensures the faithfulness to the original text and better communication effect of news reports.