Cohesion And Coherence Focused Studies On The Three English Versions Of The Art Of War

Maintaining text as a unit for translation, text-linguistic approach to translation supplies a valid ground for guaranteeing the wholeness and integrity of translation. On the basis of text linguistics, this approach also brings new research findings in translation studies, broadening and deepening its scope of research.As two of the seven important standards of textuality, cohesion and coherence are the central objects for text-linguistic studies. Cohesion proves to be of vital importance for guaranteeing the smoothness of linguistic forms on the surface and coherence on the semantic and logical relations in deep structure. Hence, the thesis lays its focus on the analysis of cohesion and coherence of three English versions of The Art of War in order to demonstrate that the application of text linguistics into translation studies is of great significance both in theory and practice.Chinese and English share a great many similarities on the classification and function of cohesive devices. In both languages, cohesion is categorized into grammatical and lexical cohesion. The former is sub-categorized into reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, and the latter into reiteration and collocation. And all the sub-categories can be further sorted. In spite of these similarities, both languages possess their unique characteristics when specific cohesive devices are put into use. Therefore, they should be handled with great care in translation.There are various factors which influence the coherence of a text, thus, this issue has been approached from different perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, cognition, psychology, culture etc. The classification of factors influencing textual coherence into intra-textual or inward ones and extra-textual or outward ones provide a feasible access for the study of coherence. Among the intra-textual factors, topic, cohesion and thematic progression play vital roles in influencing textual coherence at all levels of a text. Culture, together with the context in which a text is produced, influences the coherence of text from its outset to the end. A coherent text is one which is the combination of global and local coherence, thus, coherence is also hierarchical. As different factors play different roles in influencing textual coherence at different levels of a text, the integration of these factors into a systematic scheme, proposed by the manipulation school for the comparative study of the ST and TT, provides a better insight into the roles fully played by various factors at all levels of a text.Chapter One first reviews the definitions of text and texture, and then briefly introduces the necessity of the application of text linguistics to translation studies. Chapter Two reviews the definitions of cohesion and coherence, and the relation between them, stressing their contributions to translation studies.Chapter Three is an analysis of cohesion in the three English Versions. It first gives a brief account of cohesive features of The Art of War, and then analyses the cohesive devices and their reconstruction in the English versions, including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesive devices.Chapter Four is an analysis of coherence in the three English Versions in the four–section framework of'the Manipulation School'. It mainly analyses the different roles played by different factors in influencing textual coherence at various levels of a text. At the level of preliminary data, topic plays a leading role by means of title and the first sentence of the first paragraph; at the macro-level, it is still the topic that determines the structure of a text and the organization of its paragraphs; at the micro-level, cohesive devices and thematic progression play the major part. And finally, the thesis illustrates the influence exerted by an outward factor– culture on textual coherence.The conclusion summarizes the significance of this thesis to demonstrate that text– linguistic approach to translation is quite feasible and of great significance for translation studies.