Textual Cohesion In English-Chinese Translation

As two different types of languages,Chinese and English have contrasting ways of using cohesive devices,which exerts considerable influence directly on the process of English-Chinese translation.How to deal with the cohesive devices in English-Chinese translation matters much to the level of translation quality.The first part reviews the difference of cohesive devices in English and Chinese.Secondly,the author of this paper based on her own translation practice further reflects on the possible ways of dealing with the difference of cohesive devices.It is believed that English and Chinese are different since the former is hypotactic while the latter paratactic.The cohesive devices for English tend to be more explicit and diversified,while the Chinese discourse construction are more implicit.The author of the present paper,focusing on reference,conjunction and substitution,proposes some practical translating methods for dealing with the issue in English-Chinese translation.Firstly,the reference used in English text turns into lexical cohesion in English-Chinese translation.Moreover,the explicit cohesive devices of English turn out to be more invisible in Chinese translation,and the conjunction words used in Chinese are far less than that in English.Lastly,the substitution in English text is demonstrated by varied words,such as one,so,this,these.However,the substitution tends to be shown in Chinese translation by the nouns mentioned before in the text in order to avoid ambiguity.Largely due to this difference,cohesive devices in English discourse need to be well adjusted in English-Chinese translation.Only in this way can the readability of the translated version be improved.