A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In The Garlic Ballads And Its English Version

In recent years the study of discourse analysis has been getting more attention inthe area of linguistics. The key point of discourse analysis is to grasp the whole textfrom a macroscopic view. A valid discourse has seven principles: cohesion, coherence,intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. As one ofthe seven principles and the tangible network of a discourse, cohesion connects thedetached parts of a discourse together by the devices of grammar and lexical cohesionto make the discourse natural and fluent. Only on the basis of truly understandingcohesive devices of the source language and target language can the translatorrearrange the target text properly. Mo Yan, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literatureof2012, is the first Chinese writer winning the Nobel Prize. Two factors contribute tohis success: one is that the earthbound China of his works has attracted westernliterary circle and readers, the other is his works has been translated into manylanguages especially English. Howard Goldblatt, a famous American translator, is awell-known sinologist who has translated a lot of works of many modern andcontemporary Chinese writers including Mo Yan. The Garlic Ballads of Mo Yan istranslated into English by Howard Goldblatt.This thesis adopts the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan as the frameworkand employs qualitative research and quantitative research. In the year of1976,Halliday and Hasan coauthored a book Cohesion in English which was regarded asthe foundation of the cohesion theory. The book divides cohesive devices into twoparts: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion has fourtypes: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Reference is the specific natureof the information to be signaled for retrieval (Halliday&Hasan,2001:31).Substitution can be regarded as the replacement of one item by another (Halliday&Hasan,2001:88) and it is an important linguistic device to avoid repetition. Ellipsisis similar to substitution and simply ellipse is “substitution by zero”. Conjunctiveelements are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly by virtue of their specificmeanings and they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse (Halliday&Hasan,2001:226). The cohesive effect oflexical cohesion is achieved by the diction of vocabulary.Firstly this thesis will employ qualitative method to analyze cohesive devices inthe two versions and then quantitative method is employed to calculate the percentageof each cohesive device in chapter10and chapter20that are selected at random ofthe two versions to find the differences of the distribution of them. Findings can beconcluded that because of the different characters of the two languages, the cohesivedevice of Chinese version is more flexible than that of English version. Cohesivedevices of Chinese version usually are zero anaphor, ellipsis and collocation whileEnglish version tends to use overt cohesive device such as reference. By comparingthe distributions of cohesive devices of the two versions, it can be found thatreference used in English version is much more than that in Chinese version while thenumber of ellipsis and collocation used in Chinese version is larger than that inEnglish version. However，when it comes to substitution, the difference is not sodistinct.From the analysis of the differences of cohesive devices and strategies oftranslation of the two versions, a better understanding of cohesive devices of Englishand Chinese can be achieved and good suggestions for translations can be obtained.Due to the genre of material and the data for quantitative research are limited, somefeatures of cohesive devices between the two languages may be ignored. In the furtherstudy if more genres of material and more data for analyzing are studied morecharacteristics can be found.