Discourse Cohesion In Translation Of English And Chinese Science And Technology

Cohesion was first put forward by Halliday & Hasan in 1976, for quite a long time, many debates have been aroused among scholars about this theory and some researchers found there are many differences between English and Chinese in the cohesive devices. Then how can we bridge the gap? What are the suitable approaches to translation? Though it is not difficult to find papers or books concerning these questions, they are all focused on ordinary texts and neglect sci-tech texts. This thesis attempts to present a contrastive study of cohesion in scientific English and Chinese, uses English and Chinese sci-tech texts as the data, gets the similarities and differences and then guides sci-tech translation activity.The contents of this paper include three aspects :I . Through a large amount of comparison of language resources, to find out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in the cohesive devices in sci-tech texts;II . From the angle of language system, to analyze the reasons of differences which exist in the two language systems;III . One of the important purpose of comparative study is to guide language communication. Based on the conclusions of my studies, the paper at last discusses the application of cohesive devices in sci-tech translation.The theoretical foundation of the thesis is the cohesion theory of Systemic Fuctional Grammar of Halliday.This paper gets the following conclusions through analysis:1 )The differences of reference in sci-tech English and Chinese and its application in sci-tech translation are:I . The use frequency of pronouns in sci-tech English for sci-tech is much higher than in Chinese;II. Compared with sci-tech English, Chinese uses more zero-anaphor and zero-cataphor. So when translating we can use omission, zero-anaphors and zero-cataphors and achieve smooth translation;III. In English texts we use more "we" for exophora than "womeng (我们)" in Chinese ;IV.In sci-tech Chinese texts the third person pronoun "ta(他)"can only be used foranaphora .but its corresponding English equivalent "it" can be used for both anaphora and cataphora;V. Demonstrative pronouns possess the meaning of time and space, we should make the time and space relation very clear in sci-tech translation. In English sci-tech texts "this" is less frequent than '"that", meanwhile in Chinese texts "zhe(这)" is more frequent than "na(那)" . When mentioning statements in the preceding part, Chinese uses "zhe (这)" while English uses "that" ;VI. In sci-tech Chinese texts "zhe(这)/zhezhong (这种)" can only be used for anaphora, but in sci-tech English texts their corresponding equivalent "this" can be used for exohpora endopora, anaphora and cataphora. Meanwhile, the translation equivalents of "that/those" are not always "na (那) /naxie (那些)".2) The differences of substitution in sci-tech English and Chinese and its application in translation are:In sci-tech texts "de(的) "and "zhe(者)"are more frequent than "one" and "ones". "The same" used as a nominal substitute has no Chinese equivalent, we can translate "the same" used as a nominal substitute into "tongyangde(同样的)" or "yiyangde(一样的)", in this case, "the same" and its preceding text form substitute relation while the relation 'between "tongyangde(同样的)" or "yiyangde(一样的)" and its preceding text is reference. Sometimes we can translate "the same" by adding the adverb "ye(也)'"and repeating the word which is substituted by "the same".3) The differences of conjunction and its application in sci-tech translation are:When "and" shows additive relation we often translate it into "he(和)" or "yiji(以及)", but when "and" is used to introduce a sentence and meanwhile the relation between this sentence and its preceding text turns into temporal in the Chinese translation, we tend to translate "and" showing additive into "tongshi(同时)" showing temporal. Sometimes "and" implies other logical relation, in this case, we should recognize the implicit relati...