A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Texts And Their Translation

Cohesion, being a semantic concept, is one of the distinguishing features of a text. Connected through cohesive devices, linguistic elements can be combined into an organic whole. Cohesive devices include five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion.Since English and Chinese belong to different language families, the applications of their respective cohesive devices are not the same. The failure to understand the cohesive pattern of the source language as well as that of the target language is likely, to a large extent, to cause ambiguity or even misunderstanding. Thus, in the process of text translation, a translator should take the cohesive differences into consideration and make appropriate adjustments according to the norm of the target language and produce a text that is cohesive and coherent.Based on the theory of cohesion provided by Halliday and Hasan, the thesis discusses, through a detailed analysis of numerous examples, the similarities and dissimilarities of cohesive devices between English and Chinese. The result shows that in English, reference, substitution and conjunction are used more frequently than in Chinese; while in Chinese, ellipsis occurs more frequently.In terms of this conclusion, the author proposes that in the translating process, some necessary adjustments of cohesive devices, namely: reservation, amplification, subtraction and alteration should be made. Only by doing so, can the target text be a faithful, fluent translation and accurately convey the information of the source one and realize intercultural communication.