A Contrastive Study On Government Work Reports And Their English Versions From The Perspective Of Cohesion

With the development of the linguistics, discourse analysis has been drawing the attention of linguists and has become the focus of linguistic researches in recent years. Among numerous scholars, Halliday&Hasan have made great contribution. They not only explored the systemic functional linguistics, but also made distinctions among different stylistic features. Besides, basing on the study of stylistics, they have classified the cohesion into different types.Hasan put forward the concept of cohesion and published many scientific papers on the subject of it. Basing on many years’ researches, Hasan and her husband(Halliday) published the book Cohesion in English in 1976.A detailed introduction to cohesive devices in English is given in this book. Besides, the publication of the book marked the establishment of the cohesion. Since then, many linguists have begun to pay attention to the theory of cohesion. They study cohesion from different angles, which perfects the theory.Basing on the Cohesion Theory of Halliday & Hasan and the results of previous studies, this paper introduces the differences and similarities between Chinese and English from the aspect of cohesion( reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration and collocation) and adopts two versions of government work reports as the research materials. According to the previous researches, the biggest difference between English and Chinese lies in that the former is hypotaxis-prominent while the latter is parataxis-prominent. Therefore, overt cohesion is usually utilized in the former, while implicit cohesion is often adopted in the latter. As a result, the translation of cohesive devices is particularly important in the process of C-E translation. In addition, a preliminarily discussion about the reasons for these differences between Chinese and English cohesive devices is made in this paper.This paper aims to enrich the corpora in the English-Chinese comparative study through a comparison between the applications of cohesive devices in government work reports and their English versions.