A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In The C-E Translation Of Publicity-oriented Text Of National Mountainous Scenic Spots

As China enjoys increasing influence and political prestige in the world,governments and people abroad is showing great interest in elements which cultivate the present-day China, especially the cultural elements. Publicity-oriented text of scenic spots carrying a myriad of cultural symbols, therefore, its translation has great significance in promoting the transmission of Chinese culture and international communication. In view of the great importance of translation of publicity-oriented texts, this paper selects complete bilingual C-E translation of publicity-oriented texts of 12 scenic spots from 64 Chinese National Mountainous Scenic spots as research sample.In recent decades, the focus of research on translation has expanded from unit of word or sentence to unit of discourse. Cohesion, as one of important components and a necessary condition for discourse, is an significant concept and a basic issue in discourse translation. Ever since cohesion was proposed by Halliday and Hasan, it has gradually drawn attention from scholars at home and abroad. According to them, cohesion is a semantic concept and refers to relations of meaning that exist within text, and that define it as a text. They generally categorized cohesion into two levels: grammatical and lexical. In the grammatical level, there are conjunction, reference, substitution & ellipsis as cohesive resources. In lexical cohesion, repetition, hyponymy/ mereonymy, synonymy/antonymy and collocation links the lexical items for realization of cohesion.Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday and taking C-E translation of publicity-oriented texts of national mountainous scenic spots as research sample, the author conducts a contrastive study on how cohesion is realized and how cohesive resources are distributed in the publicity-oriented texts of national mountainous scenic spots and it English version. The paper also points out existing problems related tocohesion in the translation.The paper adopts quantitative and qualitative combined methodology to solve research questions. With discourse analysis and contrastive analysis of typical examples, it is discovered that: 1)conjunction sets up causal-conditional, additive and spatial-temporal relations between clause complexes to realize the discourse cohesion; 2) co-reference is more frequently used than comparative reference for realizing cohesion; 3) noun substitution is relatively common in the translated version; 4) lexical cohesion sets up semantic relationship between lexical items. By statistical analysis, it is concluded that 1)the English version employs cohesive devices more frequently than the Chinese version. 2)in Chinese version, lexical cohesion occupies a larger proportion than that in English. 3)Conjunction and reference is much more commonly used in English than in Chinese.4)Substitution and lexical cohesion are similarly frequently used in both language. Besides,the paper points out that mere presence of cohesive markers cannot ensure a coherent translated text.When translator can recognize the cohesive devices in the Chinese version of publicity-oriented text and reconstruct them according to the text’s feature and the norm of English language, the translation of publicity-oriented text will be more cohesive and coherent.