| English classical masterpieces are widespread and very popular among readers. They containabundant cultural connotations with high ideological and artistic values. Through studying Chinesetranslations of English masterpieces from different perspectives, this can play an important role indeepening our knowledge of culture, language, translation and so on. As a part of English-Chinesetranslation studies, Chinese translation studies of English classical works become very important.In recent years, text has been regarded as the basic unit of language study, so translation studieswill inevitably be made on the textual level. In 1976, Halliday & Hasan in their book of Cohesion inEnglish held that cohesion is an important part of the creation of texture, and cohesive devices are theonly source of texture between sentences and their roles are very outstanding. Meanwhile, theydivided the cohesion in English into five classifications: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction,and lexical cohesion. Since then, their cohesion theory and classification of cohesion have beengradually accepted and widely used.So this thesis chooses Sister Carrie, one of the most famous works of American novelistTheodore Dreiser, and its two Chinese versions as the materials to analyze and study. The twoChinese versions are Qiu Zhuchang’s version published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in1990 and Wang Kefei & Zhang Shaoning’s version published by Yilin Press in 2001 respectively.According to the cohesion theory put forward by Halliday & Hasan, the thesis mainly adopts themethod of comparison to compare the source text with the target text and compare the target text withthe target text. The Chinese translations of five cohesive devices in the English text are showed with alot of examples, and the similarities and differences between the two Chinese versions can be found.English and Chinese belong to two different language families, and English is featured by hypotaxisand Chinese by parataxis, so there are obvious differences in use of cohesive devices between Englishand Chinese texts. The translators should not only understand the meaning of the English textaccurately, but also realize the differences in use of cohesive devices between English and Chinese.They should make some proper adjustments in the translation to reproduce accurate, smooth, andnatural translation by using the cohesive devices of Chinese.The thesis includes four chapters. Chapter I mainly introduces the review of the research,including research theme, studies of Sister Carrie and its translations, research questions, materials and methodology of the research, and structure of the thesis. Chapter II mainly introduces the termsused in the thesis, such as text and cohesion, and makes the definition and explanation for them.Meanwhile, the understanding and study of cohesion and translation at abroad and home areexplained. Chapter III focuses on the contrast of Sister Carrie and its two Chinese versions from theperspective of cohesion. The Chinese translations of five cohesive devices in the English text areshowed with lots of examples. And the differences in use of cohesive devices between English andChinese texts and the differences of translation methods used by different translators can bediscovered by contrasting and analyzing these examples. Chapter IV draws a conclusion for the studyof the thesis. The results and findings are summarized, and the limitations of the study and thesuggestions for further study are introduced.In a word, the thesis analyzes and studies English masterpiece Sister Carrie and its two Chineseversions from the perspective of cohesion. Through contrasting and analyzing a lot of examples, thedifferences in use of cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts and the Chinese translationsof these cohesive devices are explained, and the similarities and differences between the two Chineseversions are discovered. Therefore, these contribute to a better understanding about Sister Carrie andits two Chinese versions. |
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