A Case Study Of Transference Of Cohesive Devices In The English Translation Of Wei Cheng

The establishment and advancement of text linguistics have continuously addednew energy into the study of translation. This has resulted in the shift of focus fromwords and sentences to texts in terms of the study of translation. Cohesion, as one ofthe most significant standard of evaluation for texts, has gradually been incorporatedinto the study of textual translation. The publishing of the book Cohesion in Englishwritten in collaboration by Halliday and Hasan marked the establishment of thecohesion theory. The book categorized the English cohesive devices into reference,substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Later than that, another booktitled Language, Context and Text written by Halliday came out in1985in which hefurther improved the cohesion theory. In the book, he classified cohesive devices intostructural and non-structural cohesive devices. The former is made up of parallelism,thematic structure and information structure. The latter is just the five devicesdiscussed in Cohesion in English.Every language has its own set of cohesive devices and these sets of cohesivedevices have both similarities and differences. This means that the translator needs tofully grasp the similarities and differences of the source language and the targetlanguage from the perspective of text and make proper transference in the course oftranslation. Grounded on the cohesion theory developed in collaboration by Hallidayand Hasan, the thesis made a study of the similarities and differences of Chinese andEnglish non-structural cohesive devices and brought up some general strategies forthe translation transference of cohesive devices with a case study of the originalversion of Fortress Besieged written by Chi’en Ch’ungshu and its English translatedversion.