An Analysis Of Cohesion In Rong Rude’s Chinese Version Of Oliver Twist

In recent years, the establishment of systemic-functional grammar theories allows linguistic study to shift its focus from sentence to text. Cohesion in English, a book co-written by system-functional linguists Halliday&Hasan in the1970s determines the significance of cohesion and coherence in text. As a necessary condition to generate text, cohesion has been further studied and interpreted by many linguists. Text is the basic unit of translation and text translation mainly depends on conveyance of meaning in text. Cohesion is an important feature in the whole textual significance, whose appropriate translation is a key factor for guaranteeing coherence in the target text and equivalent meaning between original and target text.There are many differences between English and Chinese cohesive devices, because they belong to different language families and their texts are loaded with different culture. Taking Charles Dickens’Oliver Twist and Rong Rude’s Chinese version as research sample, this thesis makes a tentative analysis on similarities and dissimilarities between English and Chinese cohesive devices and aims to pose some practical translation strategies.Through contrastive study on five cohesive devices, this thesis finds out four points:firstly, ellipsis or lexical repetition is applied in Chinese, in accordance with reference in English, and personal and demonstrative reference are more frequently used in English than in Chinese; secondly, more substitution, especially verbal substitution can be found in English than in Chinese; thirdly, for ellipsis, verbs usually are omitted in English whereas subjects in Chinese; finally, for repetition and synonymy in lexical cohesion, more frequently used reference and synonymy in English to avoid redundancy are often replaced by repetition or omission in Chinese.