A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Cohesive Devices And Their Application In Translation

In daily life, language is often used in the form of text rather than the sentences or lonely words. With the development of the studies on translation, translating practice has been extended into the textual level. Cohesion is an essential device to create a text, a tangible network in a text, and to form a basic understanding within a text. Since the founding of the cohesion theory in 1970s, which was proposed by the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan, coherence and cohesion have aroused huge concerns in the translation and linguistic circle. According to the theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan, cohesion often falls into two principal parts, known as the lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. The latter one can be further divided into ellipsis, substitution, reference and conjunction. Due to the fact that grammatical cohesion is more complex and deserves more exploration, this thesis will focus mainly on the study of grammatical cohesive devices employed in the translating practice.English and Chinese both possess some traits in the employment of the cohesive devices. It is widely known that English is a hypotactic language, Chinese is a paratactic language. English often relies on the cohesive devices to connect other parts in the language, while Chinese attaches great importance to the conveyance of meaning rather than the ways of the connection within the sentence. It is necessary for us to summarize the different traits embodied in the two languages and point out the influences which are brought about by these traits.English and Chinese share a lot of similarities in the classification of the cohesive devices, but these two languages do own their own features in the usage of the cohesive devices. Generally speaking, Chinese tends to use the paratactic cohesive devices; however, in English the usage of the hypotactic cohesive devices is preferred. Compared with Chinese, English attaches great importance to use the explicit cohesive devices like personal and demonstrative reference and substitution. In Chinese discourses, those implicit cohesive devices like repetition and ellipsis are widely seen. The differences between the two languages should have some influence on the translation of the cohesive devices at some degrees. Therefore, the proficiency and good knowledge in mastering the differences of cohesive devices between the target and source language will not only have some influences on the translation practice, but also have some impacts on the understanding of the text itself. Thus it is necessary for us to summarize and discuss the differences between the two languages and then point out these differences and figure out how these differences can affect the real translation practice in E-C and C-E, in the hope of providing some help to the translation and language teaching. However, in traditional study in the comparison between English and Chinese cohesion, we just only mentioned the number of cohesive devices and phrases in each language. Little attention has been paid to highlight the contrastive features of cohesion in English and Chinese. The influences of these contrastive features on C-E translation practice are seldom treated in a comprehensive and systematical way. This thesis tries to study the translation from the perspective of text analysis by making some comparisons on the cohesive devices on the one hand, and on the other hand bring forward the effective strategies.On the basis of the Halliday and Hasan's cohesion model theory, this thesis tries to explore the difference and similarities between English and Chinese, through a contrastive analysis on the cohesive devices via statistics and examples.This thesis will be divided into six chapters. It starts with a chapter of the main aim of and a general introduction of this thesis. Chapter two will give a review of both domestic and overseas studies on this subject. Chapter three will present a brief introduction about Halliday and Hasan's cohesion model—the theoretical foundation of the thesis, which includes five cohesive devices like substitution, reference, conjunction, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. Chapter IV attaches great importance to the contrastive study of five cohesive devices between English and Chinese. Based on this study, there are many similarities in functions and classifications between Chinese and English cohesive devices. Because of the differences in the cultural background and linguistic forms, Chinese and English have huge differences in the text-forming when employing the cohesive devices. Difference often lies in the preferences and frequencies in the usage of the cohesive devices. Generally speaking, English text is often characteristics of being compact, synthetic and hypotactic, and thus apt to exploring lots of cohesive devices, especially in ellipsis, substitution, reference and conjunctives. However, Chinese text is often diffusive, analytic and paratactic; therefore there are few chances to use the cohesive devices. Chinese text is often formed by using the repetition, which is quite obvious in translation. Chapter V manages to seek some effective strategies in the managing of the cohesive devices which come from the analysis of the examples selected from many published novels in English and Chinese. In our real translation practice, due to the similarities in English and Chinese texts, it is important to keep the original cohesion relations by maintaining the original cohesive devices in the target texts. However, in many cases, making some adjustments accordingly is also necessary. A translator has to manage the cohesive devices by the way of omission, addition or compensation accordingly in the target texts.In the conclusion chapter, some practical implications have yielded from the findings of this thesis and also some effective ways to enhance the cohesion in Chinese and English are discovered. A conclusion is made, which summarized that the differences and similarities between English and Chinese cohesive devices. Only by doing these things then can we accomplish an acceptable and coherent translation, and manage to retain the charm and images of the source text.