The Contrast Of Cohesion Between Chinese And English In Dialogues Of Harry Potter Films

Cohesion is a semantic category; it serves as a very important factor to form a text. The efficient use of all cohesive devices makes it possible to organize a text. In cohesion in English, Halliday&Hasan hold that cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within a text. They also classify cohesive devices into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion:the former includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction; the later includes lexical reiteration and collocation.Based on the theory of Halliday&Hasan, this paper selects dialogues in Harry Potter films to make a through contrast of cohesion between Chinese and English versions, aims to explore the main factors that causing these differences. It also discusses the methods of dealing with E-C cohesion translation. The contrastive analysis is helpful to E-C translation and cross-culture communication. This paper firstly compares the five cohesive devices between Chinese and English dialogues.through the comprehensive analysis and showing of lots of examples, the differences and similarities are clearly showed, and with the further discussion of reasons causing these differences, this paper also figures out the differences between this paper and former research into differences between Chinese and English cohesive devices. At last, four strategies dealing with E-C cohesive translation are discussed, namely omission, conversion, amplification and changing of word order.This paper is made up of five chapters. Chapter one is introduction, the author states the object of the research, the purpose and significance of the research, and the methodology of the research. The second chapter is an overview of the cohesion theory. On one hand, the development of the cohesion theory is concluded, especially Halliday&Hasan’s cohesion theory, together with the fruitful results that cohesion theory achieved by scholars in linguistic fields in domestic and abroad and its development in recent years; on the other hand, the author summarizes the compassion of cohesive devices between Chinese and English at home. Chapter three is the contrastive analysis between Chinese and English dialogues in the films:first, the quantitative analysis is used to gather amounts of cohesive devices used Chinese and English dialogues, to point out to frequency and scale of cohesive devices; then, the author shows a large numbers of examples to analyzes the differences of five devices, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion between Chinese and English version. In chapter four, the author explores the main factors causing differences in cohesive devices between Chinese and English dialogues, and the differences between this paper and former research. Four strategies dealing with cohesive devices in E-C translation are discussed at the end of chapter four. Chapter five is conclusion; the author summarizes the differences between Chinese and English cohesive devices, and points out that a proper dealing with the cohesive devices in E-C translation is helpful to better understand the original text and reconstruct the text; it also plays a very important role in English film translation and cross-culture communication.