A Study Of The Relation Between Lexical Density And Lexical Cohesion In English-Chinese Translation Texts

Based on Michael Hoey's theoretical framework, this thesis aims at investigating the interrelationship between lexical density and lexical cohesion in oratorical texts, and intends to explore the correlation of lexical density and lexical cohesion with English-Chinese translation quality. It is expected that this thesis can provide some implications for English-Chinese translation. For this purpose, Obama's victory speech and its five Chinese translation texts will be compared from the perspective of lexical density and patterns of lexis.Focusing on lexical choices, the construction of clauses, the whole organization and style of a text, lexical density is also a potential indicator of text type, i.e. it is used to differentiate types of spoken or written discourse. So many linguists regard it as a defining measure between spoken and written texts (Ure, 1971; Halliday, 1985; Stubbs, 1986). Ure who is one of the first linguists to explore this field works on lexical density in spoken texts and written texts respectively and gets the results that the LD for spoken texts is under 40% and for the written texts is 40% and over; in other words, the proportion of lexical items in contrast to grammatical items is higher in written texts than spoken texts (1971).Lexical cohesion theory has been of great concern in the linguistic field since the publication of the book Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Many researches were undertaken to explore lexical cohesion. However, only Michael Hoey refined lexical cohesion theory in a more detailed and systematic way. He regarded lexical cohesion as the single most important form of cohesive tie (Hoey, 1991:9) and analyzed patterns of lexis in non-narrative texts. Lexical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is a crucial and indispensible element for creating texts and one of the important devices in discourse analysis. And thus it contributes a lot to text construction. Hoey also proposed nine kinds of lexical cohesion as simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, simple mutual paraphrase, simple partial paraphrase, antonymous complex paraphrase, other complex paraphrase, substitution, co-reference and ellipsis.Both lexical density and lexical cohesion have been applied into the wide range of linguistic studies. However researches that combined them together are rare. It is even more difficult to find that the application of lexical density and lexical cohesion to English-Chinese translation quality. The present study adopts Ure's procedure of calculating lexical density, which is more feasible than Halliday's method and Hoey's classification of lexical cohesion. After identified all the lexical density and patterns of lexis in the original text and five Chinese translation texts manually, the study makes a contrastive analysis on lexical density and lexical cohesion, and tries to find out their contribution to translation quality.The contrastive analysis of the Chinese translation texts reveals significant differences and similarities in the original oratorical text and its translation texts as related to these two factors. The thesis also provides insights to English-Chinese translation. It is hoped to give translators and researchers more inspiration to evaluate translation quality and to enrich translation criteria from the perspective of lexical density and lexical cohesion.