A Contrastive Study And The Translation Of English And Chinese Cohesive Devices In Texts

This thesis is mainly an attempt to discuss the differences between English and Chinese cohesive devices and their influence on translation.Cohesion theory has been of great concern in the linguistic and the translation circle since the publication of the book Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. In the past several decades, the research on text has played a key role in linguistic research with the development of other linguistic branches such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics. Therefore, cohesion theory has been applied to many fields and subjects, especially the contrastive study and translation theory and practice. Many linguists and scholars have been studying cohesion and coherence and have tried to establish the relation between them and their importance in the production of a text. Cohesion is seen as a necessary part in text production and thus possesses an important position in text translation.Although English and Chinese share a common classification of cohesive devices, which mainly include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, the two languages do possess their own feature in respect of using cohesive devices. Generally English can be regarded as a language that prefers hypotactic cohesive devices while Chinese prefers paratactic cohesive devices. Differing from Chinese, English focuses on such explicit cohesive markers as conjunctive words, personal reference, demonstrative reference and substitution; while those implicit cohesive markers like ellipsis and repetition can be frequently seen in Chinese texts. This difference between the two languages has some influence on translation of cohesive devices to a great extent. Therefore, a good knowledge and a proper mastery of the differences of cohesive devices between source language and target language will not only influence the understanding of the original text, but also have great impacts on the translation. Thus it is necessary to discuss and summarize the differences and then figure out the influence that they might have on the translation of English and Chinese in hope of giving some help to translation and language teaching.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the development of text and cohesion theory, and their indispensable inspiration for translation. It also accounts for the definitions of terms involved. Chapter two reviews the literature of the previous studies on cohesion and some influential studies at home and abroad are presented. Chapter three is a contrastive study of the English and Chinese cohesive devices based on Halliday and Hu Zhuanglin's cohesion theories. Five main types of cohesive devices are elaborated and the contrastive features of each cohesive device will be generally probed into. Chapter four is the analysis of the study result of the contrastive study and translation of the five main cohesive devices. The main strategies for the translation of cohesive devices will be summarized and data analysis will be made in hope of giving some help to language teaching and translation practice. Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis. English and Chinese cohesive devices bear similarities as well as great differences. The reasons can be explained from the aspects of culture and language features. Language is cultural-specific. Different peoples in different cultures speak different languages. They constantly live in their native cultures and acquire their specific cultural notions and ways of thinking. As to the language features, English and Chinese have their own special one. Many scholars believe that the most fundamental difference in Chinese and English is that of parataxis and hypotaxis. Generally speaking, English can be regarded as a language that prefers hypotactic cohesive devices while Chinese prefers paratactic cohesive devices. In the translation of English and Chinese texts, the translator needs to find the proper methods to translate the cohesive devices in the texts in order to achieve the goal of cohesion and coherence.