An Analysis Of The Old Man And The Sea And Its Chinese Translation From The Perspective Of Textual Cohesion

In1976, Halliday and Hasan published a book named Cohesion in English, inwhich they think cohesion will come into being where the meaning of one languageitem relies on that of another. Halliday and Hasan analyzed the cohesion in Englishlanguage in this book, and they divided the cohesive devices into five groups:reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. This book drew alot of scholars’ interest at home and abroad and they shifted their attention fromsentences study to textual study. Although the Cohesion Theory has been improvedstep by step, when many scholars studied on Cohesion Theory from differentperspectives, there are still some aspects needed to be further explained. For example,the relationship between “cohesion” and “coherence” is vague, the study on therelationship between “textual” and “context” is limited, and the effect of the differentcohesive devices in the textual cohesion is unclear.Based on Cohesion Theory, the author will choose Hemingway’s most popularwork The Old Man and the Sea and Hai Guan’s Chinese translation as the studymaterial. And qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, as well as statistics andcase study, will be used to the comparative study of these two texts.In this thesis, there are five Chapters. ChapterⅠintroduces the literary review,the reasons for choosing the materials, study methods, and study purposes. Chapter Ⅱgives a brief introduction to the five cohesive devices, and explores the relationshipand differences among them. Chapter Ⅲ adopts qualitative analysis and case study tomake a comparative study of The Old Man and the Sea and Hai Guan’s Chinesetranslation. In Chapter Ⅳ, quantitative analysis is used to account the number,frequency and usage ratio of these five cohesive devices in the chosen texts, and theauthor finds that Chinese text and English text have obvious differences on personalreference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. Chinese is inclines to omit the subjects,possessive pronouns and objects, and zero anaphora as well as reiteration, has beenwidely used in Chinese. On the basis of this, Chapter V explains the characteristics of the textual cohesion in The Old Man and the Sea and its Chinese translation. Andauthor also pays attention to the reasons of the differences between the English textand Chinese text from the following aspects:(1) English undergoes a long time ofchanging from the Old English or Anglo-Saxon, while Chinese experiences a relativedevelopment, and has a few changes;(2) English is hypotactic and Chinese isparatactic.(3) The thinking patterns between the China and the Westerners aredifferent. The last Chapter is the conclusion.