On Cohesion In E-C Translation Of Novels

In the 1970s, Halliday and Hasan put forward the concept of Cohesion for the first time and improve the textual cohesion theory framework in their book Cohesion in English, which classifies and explains cohesive devices in a systematic way. With the development of discourse analysis and textual translation study, the range of cohesion has been constantly expanding, and more and more researchers began to explore the relationship between cohesion and translation. Through comparative studies of Chinese and English cohesive devices, researchers analyze similarities and differences of cohesive devices between the two languages and find cohesion theory has its own significance to the study of translation. The translator’s understanding and grasp of the similarities and differences of the cohesive devices between the source language and the target language will not only affect the translator’s understanding of the original text, but also influence the quality of the translation.In the present study, based on her own translation practice, the author chooses the novel Sooner or Later We All Stop Laughing by Australian female writer Roz Baker and its translation as the linguistic data for comparison and study. With Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory as the basis and quantitative and qualitative analysis as her research methods, the author firstly compares and analyzes the similarities and differences of the five cohesive devices in English and Chinese texts with the examples from the linguistic data, and then discusses the handling of cohesive devices in translation. Through the contrastive study of cohesive devices in English and Chinese and the analysis of the translation practice, the author finds that the differences in language characteristics and expression habits lead to different ways of cohesion in English and Chinese. Thus, in translation practice, in order to create translation texts which are cohesive, smooth and faithful to the original text, translators should not only pay attention to the different cohesive devices of the source language and the target language, but also need to shift those cohesive devices into appropriate form so as to reconstruct the translation text properly.