Textual Cohesion And Its Shifts In Translation

Translation is a communicative activity involving two languages at the micro level and two cultures at the macro level. With language being the basic carrier of cultural exchange, any study concerning translation activities is bound to be related to a detailed examination of the two linguistic systems in question-the source language and target language. However, it is not words or individual sentences that a translator translates, but rather texts. With cohesion and coherence being the central properties of a text, it becomes quite essential for us to compare the differences and similarities in the use of cohesive ties in the two languages concerned. It should follow that a high-quality translation would bear the test of a comprehensive contrastive analysis of the cohesive devices in the source text and the target text.Therefore, the author of this thesis conducts a contrastive study to analyze the most important and basic standard of textuality-cohesion in English-Chinese translation. This thesis attempts to establish the inherent relationship and inter-dependence between cohesion and translation. During the discussion, the major factors contributing to the differences of those cohesive systems within the two languages have been examined in detail, with the reasons behind translation shifts analyzed and corresponding translation techniques recommended. And this contrastive study is conducted within the theoretical framework of cohesion put forward by Halliday and Hasan. The thesis unfolds with five major sections, namely the differences and similarities of English and Chinese texts with regard to reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion and conjunction.Supported by numerous examples from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and its Chinese translation by Zi Pei and Zhen Lili, the thesis has concluded that both English and Chinese adopt extremely complex and different systems of textual cohesion. Consequently, translation shifts are inevitable and often essential throughout the conversion process, and thus relevant translation techniques should be adopted.