A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices In Government Work Report C-E Translation

With the rapid development of economy and society, China has become anindispensable part in the international community, gaining the widespread attention ofthe world. The Government Work Report reflects China’s present situation, nationalpolicies proposed, and achievements made of the previous years, providing a greatplatform for the foreign countries to understand China. Therefore, the translation ofgovernment work report is of importance.Since1970s, the research of contextual linguistics has been widely applied intothe field of translatology, exploring a brand new road for translation studies. Cohesionas one of the most important factors in textual study, plays a significance role intranslation studies, for the translator’s recognition and command of cohesive devicesin both source language and target language have great influence on the quality of thetranslated version.Thus, based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan, the authormakes a further study of C-E translation of government work report from theperspective of cohesive devices through a more systematic and comprehensive scope.This thesis aims at finding the similarities and distinctions of cohesive devices ingovernment work report and its C-E translation from five perspectives of textualcohesion, namely, reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.In terms of similarity, comparative reference and collocation in the Chinese text issimilar to the English text. From the perspective of discrepancy, cohesive devices likepersonal reference, demonstrative reference, and conjunction are more frequently seenin English version, and repetition and reiteration are preferred by Chinese language.Therefore, reasons for different usage of cohesive devices in the Chinese version andthe English version are listed from the aspects linguistic study and cross-culturalcommunication. According to the statistics collected and texts compared, the authorproposes five strategies in Government Work Report translation, illustrating thatomission is preferential to E-C translation, repetition and replacement is preferred byC-E translation, and literal translation occurs when the grammatical structure of thetwo languages is similar.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the studiespresented by the author, and the destinations to achieve. Chapter two reviews the studies of the theory of cohesion and political translation, to find the breakthroughs ofGWR translation study. Chapter three is the theoretical framework and methodologyto support the contrastive study of cohesive devices in GWR. In this part, the authorintroduces the terms like “text”,“cohesion”, and “translation” so as to explore theconnection among three of them. At the same time the features of GWR are illustratedherein. Chapter four, as the core part, focuses on discussion and analysis of examples,with aims of finding out the different usages of cohesive devices in GWR and its C-Eversion. Reasons of differences of cohesive devices usage are analyzed as well.Chapter five proposes the translation strategies being beneficial to finding a bettertranslation of GWR, especially for the C-E translation. Chapter six is the conclusionwith findings and limitations of the study.