A Contrastive Functional Analysis Of Reference As A Cohesive Device Between English And Chinese And Its Translation

Cohesive devices are of great significance to translation since they establish textualcohesion in the source and target texts by linking sentences together and create semanticunity. Among the various categories of cohesive devices, reference is the mostemployed one. However, due to the differences between English and Chinese languagesand culture, how to properly render reference becomes particularly tricky.Yet less attention has been paid to the translation of reference from English toChinese. Previous studies show that the translation strategies for reference are far fromsatisfactory. These translation strategies concluded mainly from previous contrastivestudies are either too general or even misleading, lacking of theoretically soundedmethodology.This thesis is dedicated to the study of the translation of reference as a cohesivedevice based on contrastive functional analysis in an effort to address the existingproblem of translation strategies for reference. To achieve this end, data collected from25English texts and25of their Chinese translations have been analyzed bothquantitatively and qualitatively. The similarities and differences between the waysEnglish and Chinese reference are expressed have been discussed followed anelaboration of the conditions where the differences occur.On the basis of the contrastive functional analysis, tentative translation strategieshave been forwarded for the translation of personal, demonstrative and comparativereference under specific conditions.