| The discourse marker is a common linguistic phenomenon. Correctunderstanding and application of discourse markers would not only make thespeaker’s discourse clearer, but also help the hearer get a better understanding. So,research into discourse markers has important theoretical value as well as practicalsignificance.Since Halliday and Hason’s coauthored work Cohesion in English andSchiffrin’s Discourse Markers were published, there have been more and more studiesabout discourse markers, which have become a new topic in discourse analysis andpragmatics in recent years. However, the understanding of its roles and functions hasnot been agreed upon. Comparative studies of Chinese and English discourse markers,how to localize the theory of foreign discourse markers to guide our own studies andsome other problems remain to be further explored. This study will attempt to studyand explore discourse markers. While analyzing them, the author would also try tomake a distinction between them and other determiners. And the author will also tryhis best to do something to explain his ideas about the scope of discourse markers.Up until now, there have not been many studies on the English version of thenovel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant in China. In this paper, the author will take YuHua’s novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and its English translation to set up aparallel corpus, then makes a systematic analysis and studies of discourse markers inthis novel and their English translation with the relevance-adaptation theoreticapproach. Focusing on a couple of key discourse markers, the author would try hisbest to find out and analyze the similarities and differences between Chinesediscourse markers and their English counterparts. He also uses examples to illustrate that translating is both a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and adynamically-adjusting process. The author finds that the discourse markers in Englishand Chinese have many similarities and differences. Distinguishing whether a word isa discourse marker or not in Chinese is always more complicated than in English. Andbecause of the special characteristics of the English language, discourse markers aremore frequently used in English than in Chinese. The translator should seek theoptimal relevance to the author’s intention according to the specific context of adiscourse marker and makes dynamic adjustment in the target cognitive environment. |
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