On Translation Of Grammatical And Lexical Cohesive Devices

The theory of coherence provided by Halliaday and Hasan (1976) is taken as the theoretical basis of the thesis and applied in translation studies. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), the cohesive devices for coherence are divided into five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Modern Text Linguistics, which is an important development of Halliday and Hasan's theory of coherence, provides a new perspective to translation theories and practices.Text refers to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. A text may be defined as a communicative occurrence that meets seven standards of texuality, the core of which is coherence, realized by various types of cohesive devices. According to the theory of coherence, the goal of translation is to reproduce coherence and cohesion of the original text, which is the development and specification of the traditional translation principle—faithfulness. In most cases, literal reproduction of coherence and cohesion of the source text can be achieved in the target text, in which faithfulness is achieved both in form and in style. While in some cases, owing to the differences of language and culture, conversion must be applied necessarily to conform to the target language. Even so, to a certain extent, it can also be said to be faithful to the original.The key point of faithfulness to the original is the proper application of cohesive devices, which can be classified into different categories from different perspectives, such as implicit and explicit cohesive devices, grammatical and lexical cohesive devices, etc. Given the wide range of cohesion and the limited length of this thesis, and the author's insufficient data for reference, this thesis has mainly made an attempt to probe into the translation of grammatical and lexical devices.Due to the differences between English and Chinese culture and language itself, there are differences between English and Chinese coherence and cohesion. The thesis will discuss, through a detailed analysis of numerous examples, the differences of the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices between English and Chinese.The author holds that the translator should strive to reproduce coherence and cohesion of the source text in the target text. In order to achieve this, the translator can translate source text literally when the ST (source text) and TT (target text) share similarities, while turn to conversion or make other necessary adjustments when they have differences.The author cherishes the hope that, in some measure, this thesis may make a contribution to translation theories and practices and waits to read more and better articles and thesis on this subject.