A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Apple Tree From The Perspective Of Non-structural Cohesive Devices

The paper compares three different Chinese versions of The Apple Tree from the perspective of non-structural cohesive devices. The comparative study of different versions of the same original is a commonly employed method in the field of literary translation criticism, which is helpful to ensure the objectivity of translation criticism.As far as non-structural cohesive devices are concerned, they consist of four types: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In fact, what non-structural cohesive devices include is the same as grammatical cohesive devices that are defined by Halliday and Hasan. According to them, cohesive devices fall into five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Except for lexical cohesion, others belong to grammatical cohesive devices. Based on the meaning of cohesion explained by Halliday and Hasan, we could say they only regard explicit cohesive devices as their research subjects. However, Zhang Delu (2002:87) believes the concept of cohesion needs to be expanded to include all the semantic relations that serve to relate the elements and parts of text to each other and form a totality. Therefore, the new classification of cohesion devices is adopted in this paper.In this paper, the comparative study of the three Chinese versions of The Apple Tree from the perspective of non-structural cohesive devices is carried out. Under the guidance of translation strategies summarized by many Chinese scholars, such as Zhu Yongsheng, Li Yunxing, etc, the author tries to objectively evaluate the three Chinese versions only from the angles of reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Some typical examples covering those categories are compared with each other. Mistakes in E-C translation are discussed, and sometimes the author provides her own versions. Of course, to evaluate the three versions is not the ultimate goal of the paper. During the process of the comparative study, some translation strategies are further discussed. For example, nominal ellipsis that consists of several subtypes is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Halliday and Hasan have detailed accounts of and, one conjunctive, in Cohesion in English. Based on their accounts, the translation strategies of and are summed up in Chapter 6.It must be pointed out that in terms of both breadth and depth, the study is still very limited. It is only a tentative exploration of the profound fields of cohesion and translation. If it can shed some light on the studies of cohesion and translation, the author's efforts will be worth all the while.