Shih-shuo Hsin-yü And Its English Version: A Contrastive Study On Lexical Cohesion

In modern translation research, texts are generally adopted as the basic unit, and contrastive study has shifted its focus from sentence level to texts as well. In an attempt to reveal the respective features of cohesion of Chinese and English texts, on the basis of Halliday and Hasan's model of lexical cohesion, this thesis makes systematical contrastive study on lexical cohesion used in the Chinese classic literature work Shih-shuo Hsin-yüand its English version A New Account of Tales of the World.According to Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, lexical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization and natural cohesion can be realized through the reiteration or collocation relations of some lexis in a text. Reiteration includes repetition, synonym, superordinate and general word; while devices of collocation contain antonym, words drawn from ordered series, and lexical chains. Employing quantitative and qualitative methods, the author compares the cohesive effect of their lexical cohesive devices and respective differences with abundant examples. Additionally, reasons which cause these similarities and differences are analyzed in depth.This contrastive study reveals that: In Shih-shuo Hsin-yüand its English version A New Account of Tales of the World, the number of lexical cohesive devices of the Chinese version is more than that of the English version, but just in a respectively slight degree. For the sake of avoiding redundancy, in English, synonym often substitute repetitions in Chinese. The Chinese text Shih-shuo Hsin-yüemploys more pairs of antonyms as marks of parallel sentences to achieve language symmetry and to create flowing beauty of language; while in the English translation, some of the antonyms are substituted by grammatical devices or omitted when no equivalent expressions can be found. Apart from frequency, the forms of repetition, synonym and antonym are not completely equivalent. The usage of superordinate, general word and lexical chains in the two versions present more similarities other than disparities.This contrastive study is not only an application of lexical cohesion theory in C-E text translation practice, but also proves to be of certain value to the English translation of Chinese classic literature works.