A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Lexical Cohesive Devices

Today's translation study has shifted its focus from words and sentence level to text level. As part of the text study, cohesion theory attracted much attention. Cohesion devices include grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. Comparing with grammatical cohesion, less study goes to lexical cohesion. The thesis tries to make a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights from the pespective of lexical cohesion. One version is Yang Yi's and the other is Fang Ping's. Through the comparison of the two translations, the thesis is aimed at evaluating the quality of the two translations of lexical cohesion and finding how to handle literary text properly in E-C translation of lexical cohesion. It is hoped that the thesis will be helpful to translation theory and practice especially to the cohesion theory, and translation criticism .On the basis of Halliday and Hasan's categorization of lexical cohesive devices in the book Cohesion in English, and by referring to other scholars'categories of lexical cohesive devices, the author adopts the following categories of lexical cohesive devices: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, collocation (in the same context) and instantial relations (text-bound). Besides, there are other theoretical supports: the relationship between cohesion, coherence text and translation; the relationship between translation and contrastive linguistics; and the criteria and methods of translation.The thesis mainly adopts the comparative method. The comparison goes to the two translations, the Chinese translation versions and the original work, the translation principle and strategies the translators use and so on. Besides, other methods are also used, such as sampling, close reading and evaluation.Through the comparison,conclusions can be made that both versions of translations are in accordance with the translation criteria adopted in the thesis to the largest extent and are good translations. Most of the lexical cohesion are translated properly in the target language. Sometimes the original lexical cohesion is kept while sometimes they have to be changed in order to produce a translation which accords with the constitution of Chinese language and coherent in Chinese. We can also find that lexical cohesion plays an important role in creating texual coherence. Understanding the lexical cohesion of the souce language can help the translator comprehend the original text precisely and understanding the lexical cohesion of target language can help the translator produce the translation properly. Therefore, a thorough understanding of lexical cohesion in source and target language is necessary in translation for a translator. By doing so, he can possibly create a faithful, smooth, natural and coherent translation.