| In 1960s, the emergence of text linguistics overcame the limitation of sentence-oriented study and elevated the study of language from sentence level to textual level. When text linguistics was introduced into the study of translation, the basic communicative units in translation were shifted from words or isolated sentences to texts. Cohesion as"visible network"plays a significant role in organizing linguistic elements into a text of unified whole and naturally becomes one of the most important subjects of text translation.With the development of contrastive linguistics and text translation, many researchers have conducted comparative studies of cohesion in different text types between English and Chinese and have analyzed the role of cohesion in translation. However, few studies have been reported on a comparative study of cohesion in English and Chinese medical texts until now. Based on cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hason, our study was designed to analyze the similarities and differences of cohesive devices in English medical texts and their Chinese translations in textbooks and to explore the regularity in shifting cohesive devices from English to Chinese. Additionally, translation techniques for cohesive devices were revealed, which may facilitate the functional equivalence between the original text and the translated text at textual level. In our study, a pretest was conducted to attest the feasibility of the designed research and some desired results were obtained in sample texts in a mini-sized corpus. Following the pretest, a larger parallel corpus including 15 English medical texts and 15 parallel Chinese translations which were randomly selected by a two-round stratified sampling was established for the study. The sample texts in the parallel corpus, which were selected from five medical English textbooks published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in China, were derived from five disciplines of medicine: clinical medicine, basic medicine, public health, pharmacology and military medicine. Three texts in each medical discipline made up the English corpus, while their Chinese versions constituted the Chinese corpus. The cohesive devices in the selected sample texts were identified according to the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hason (1976). Then they were hand-tagged and analyzed by Paired-t test with SPSS13.0 software. Based on the comparison of cohesive devices in the parallel corpus, six techniques for the translation of cohesive devices from English to Chinese were identified and counted manually. The major findings of our study were as follows:1) Among the cohesive devices used in English medical texts and their Chinese translation texts, lexical cohesion had the highest percentage (87.5% in EMTs, 89.4% in CTTs), followed by reference (8.9% in EMTs, 7.1% in CTTs) and conjunction (3.5% in EMTs, 3.46% in CTTs), whereas substitution and ellipsis rarely occurred. Our finding was consistent with what was reported by Wang Qian (2005) and Jia Lingyu (2006) in their contrastive studies on cohesion between English scientific texts and their Chinese renderings. No significant difference was found in the overall cohesive devices in terms of their occurrence frequencies between EMTs and CTTs (p>0.05).2) In the use of lexical cohesion, reiteration (93.0% in EMTs, 92.8% in CTTs) was the dominant cohesive device while collocation (7.0% in EMTs, 6.2% in CTTs) showed a very low frequency. Among the subcategories of reiteration, repetition (81.1% in EMTs, 81.14% in CTTs) was the most frequently used lexical cohesion, followed by synonym (16.4% in EMTs, 17.14% in CTTs), superordinate (1.8% in EMTs, 1.68% in CTTs) and"general"item (0.7% in EMTs, 0.04% in CTTs). Significant difference was only found in the occurrence frequencies of"general"item between EMTs and CTTs (p<0.05).3) Among the three subcategories of reference, demonstrative reference (62.7% in EMTs, 66.3% in CTTs) accounted for the largest proportion in the parallel corpus, followed by personal reference (20.0% in EMTs, 17.1% in CTTs) and comparative reference (17.3% in EMTs, 16.6% in CTTs) in a descending order. This result was in accordance with that obtained by Jia Lingyu (2006). There was significant difference in the statistical result of demonstrative reference and personal reference (p<0.05).4) Among the subcategories of conjunction, the most frequently used devices of conjunction were additive device (39% in EMTs, 38% in CTTs) and adversative device (31% in EMTs, 30% in CTTs), whereas causal device (16% in EMTs, 18% in CTTs) and temporal device (14% in both EMTs and CTTs) were much less frequently used. Our finding was in agreement with the conclusion drawn by Chen Yongning (2004) and Han Xiao (2008). There was no statistical difference among the four subcategories between EMTs and CTTs in their occurrence frequencies (p>0.05).5) Among the six techniques for cohesive devices in E-C translation, maintenance (86.1%) was found to be the most frequently applied translation technique, followed by amplification (4.2%), omission (3.8%), conversion (3.1%) and modulation (2.3%), whereas repetition (0.5%) was the least employed technique.6) The frequencies of employing each technique varied with the cohesive types in E-C translation. Five techniques were used in translating lexical devices with maintenance (89%) as the predominant one, followed by amplification (4%), conversion (2.7%), modulation (2.5%), and omission (1.8%). In the translation of reference, maintenance (47.8%) was the mainly used technique, followed by omission (25.3%), amplification (12.5%), conversion (9.2%), and repetition (5.2%). For conjunction translation, maintenance (96%) was the predominantly employed technique, followed by amplification (2%) and omission (2%).We can draw the following conclusions from our study:Firstly, English medical texts and their Chinese translations in textbooks share more similarities than differences in the use of cohesive devices. The similarities between them mainly exist in following aspects: 1) The three mainly used cohesive types and their subcategories show the same distribution tendency in both EMTs and CTTs. 2) The overall cohesive devices, conjunction device and lexical cohesion in EMTs are used as frequently as those in CTTs. These similarities can be attributed to the informative function and stylistic features of medical texts.Secondly, Differences between EMTs and CTTs only exist in the use of reference device in terms of their occurrence frequencies. Demonstrative reference and personal reference are more frequently used in EMTs than in CTTs. Instead of using explicit cohesive markers in English, Chinese prefers the omission of reference and the repetition of nominal nouns to create cohesion at textual level, which is mainly due to the specific feature of the two languages: English is more hypotactic while Chinese is more paratactic.Thirdly, since EMTs and CTTs bear great resemblance, most cohesive devices are maintained in E-C translation for the sake of preciseness, clarity and smoothness. In some cases, however, the techniques of amplification, conversion, omission, repetition and modulation should be used to make adequate meaning rearrangement in order to achieve the closest natural equivalence.Our study is a tentative investigation into cohesion in English medical textbooks and is a new research in Chinese translation of medical English. Based on the establishment of a parallel corpus, we have analyzed the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between English medical texts and their Chinese translations and have revealed some corresponding techniques in E-C translation. The findings of the study may help medical students and translators have a better understanding of the regularity in the use of cohesive devices in English and Chinese medical texts, shed light on the practice of medical translation, and lay a solid foundation for the information rendering from the original text into the translated text accurately and smoothly.
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