On Transfer Of Cohesive Devices In The English Version Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

Six Chapters of a Floating Life, one of Chinese classical works for its high literary value and aesthetic value, gained great popularity after its publication. Translated by Lin Yutang, the English version of the book is very popular in the west, becoming the fortune in the world. Scholars have studied the translation from different angles, ranging from culture, linguistic characteristics, the subjectivity of the translator, aesthetic and the norms of translation, etc. But few studies have touched upon the field of text translation.Traditional translation studies put emphasis on translation of words and sentences. However, text linguistics focuses on how sentences construct a text and convey the pragmatic meanings in certain context. This thesis, based on the cohesion theory put forward in Cohesion in English written by Michael Alexander Kirkood Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, aims at studying the ways of transferring cohesive devices in Six Chapters of a Floating Life by Lin Yutang at the text level. The author proposes the method that applied in transferring cohesive devices in Six Chapters of a Floating Life by analyzing the translation of each kind of cohesive devices in the two versions.There are five chapters in this thesis. In Chapter I, the author introduces the research background, the aim of this thesis and the studies of Six Chapters of a Floating Life. Chapterâ…¡focuses on the definition of text and translation, the studies of text both at home and abroad and the research of text in translation studies. Cohesive devices in Cohesion in English of Halliday are also introduced in this chapter. In Chapterâ…¢, there is an detailed analysis of Six Chapters of a Floating Life from the aspect of cohesive devices--reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion by numbers of examples. Basing on the analysis, the author intends to find out how the translator translates cohesive devices in the book. In Chapterâ…£, the author proposes the ways of transferring cohesive devices based on the comparison which is done to find out the application similarities and differences of them in the two language systems. The last Chapter is conclusion, which includes two parts. In the first part the author proposes the methods of transferring cohesive devices in Lin's version while the second one concerns the aspects that have to be further studied.