A Study Of Esp’s Grammatical Cohesive Devices And It’s Translation Transformation

Since1990’s, the theories of discourse linguistics have been widely applied into thestudy of translation. It is because that the two subjects have the same characteristic thatthey both need to accurately describe the context not only beyond the level of words andsentence but from the view of discourse. Cohesion is one of the core concepts of discoursestudies and the cohesion theory is firstly proposed by Halliday and Hasan in their bookCohesion in English. It is their viewpoint that cohesion exists inside the texts and throughthe grammar and vocabulary makes it a coherent discourse and a related text. Cohesivedevices can be divided into grammatical one and lexical one. The former includes thereference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction and the latter one contains reiteration andcollocation.With three kinds of common ESP as corpus, this thesis provides a comparison of thedifferences of the language styles of News English, law English, and advertising English.Based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan, it also analyzes the four cohesive devices inEnglish. Through large number of examples, this thesis discusses the differences betweenEnglish and Chinese cohesion, the application and transformation in translation, so as toenrich the translation methods. In Chapter1, a brief introduction is given about the wholethesis including research background, significance, the layout and content of the thesis.Chapter2is a literature review of the development of the studies on cohesion andtranslation of cohesion. An introduction of four kinds of cohesive devices is provided inChapter3. In Chapter4, the author takes three common ESP as corpus and analyzes theircharacteristics in terms of vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric, and summarizes some relatedtranslating methods. Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan, chapter5is acomparison of the grammatical cohesive devices of English and Chinese,and it illustratesthe similarities and differences of the three styles. In chapter6, the main idea of the thesisis summarized and some suggestions for further study are also proposed. Finally theconclusion is made that owing to the different grammar and language habits, the using ofcohesive devices is quite different in Chinese and English. English emphasizing hypotaxisbut Chinese tends to use parataxis, which could have great influence on theEnglish-Chinese translation of the cohesive devices, so it is vital to distinguish the twocohesive devices in both Chinese and English and realize the integration of the mutualconversion so as to achieve the semantic coherence. Only with the good understanding ofthe differences of the cohesive devices of the two languages, especially the cohesion and methods of the target language, and with good mastering of cohesion transforming rules,the original meaning of the source language can be put flexibly and accurately into thetarget language so that the ideal effect of translation can be satisfactorily achieved.