A Contrastive Study Of Domestic Key University Introductions And Their English Versions From The Perspective Of Textual Cohesion

Cohesion is an important feature of text. Whether a group of sentences can comprise a text is determined by the cohesive relationships between sentences. Halliday and Hasan made a systematic study of it for the first time, and the beginning of textual cohesion theory was marked by the publication of their book Cohesion in English (1976). They divide cohesion into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Studies on textual cohesion theory and contrast of textual cohesion have been dealt with extensively both at home and abroad. However, by searching China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), it is found that there are rarely researches on the contrastive analysis of university introductions and their English versions from the perspective of textual cohesion. In order to promote the exchanges and cooperation with other countries, there are English versions corresponding to the web profiles of domestic university introductions, which will facilitate this study and the establishment of parallel copora.This thesis mainly applies qualitative and quantitative approach of the cohesive devices. Fifteen comparable university introductions and their English versions are employed in this thesis as the corpora, and the contrastive study is carried out with these reliable corpora. By using the function of finding and substituting of Microsoft word 2003 and related functions of Excel, statistical analyses are made about cohesive devices in English and Chinese. The main aims are to find out the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between English and Chinese, and to figure out the causes of these similarities and differences, especially the differences. The conclusion is drawn that reference, substitution and conjunction in Chinese are not so frequently used as those in English, these cohesive devices tend to be omitted in Chinese; in terms of the frequency of ellipsis and lexical cohesion, the frequency of these two in Chinese is higher than that in English. The reason for these differences can be explained via language and culture. Chinese is a language of parataxis, while English is a hypotactic one. Due to this feature, Chinese tends to lay emphasis on the expression of meaning, yet English focuses on grammatical forms rather than meaning.The findings above can give us some inspirations in translation. This thesis puts forward several tentative translation strategies for each category of cohesive devices (e.g. omission, amplification, and conversion etc.), and also points out its directive significance to high-quality translation.