A Contrastive Study Of Reference In English And Chinese Legislative Texts And Its Translation

Cohesion is one of the most basic concepts in the field of text analysis and is also an important topic in text analysis.Reference is the most common cohesive devices as one of the categories of grammatical cohesion by Halliday and Hasan.The author took the use of cohesion in legislative text as research direction,and picked out two corresponding chapters of legal texts as research corpus from the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China,The People’s Republic of China Negotiable Instrument Law and The Uniform Commercial Code of the United States,chose the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan as the basis,made a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,used contrastive analysis to compare the similarities and dissimilarities of reference items,one of the cohesive devices,between the Chinese legislative texts(CLT)and English legislative texts(ELT).At last,the author summarized some methods of how to translate reference items between Chinese and English basing on the research in this article.The study found that,there are obvious differences between the reference items in general text and the legislative text.When the comparison is narrowed down to the legislative text,the study found that there are both similarities and dissimilarities in the usage of reference items in Chinese and English legislative texts.First of all,in terms of personal reference,the choice of reference items in the English legislative texts is more diversified,and the reference items in Chinese legislative texts are quite different from those in general text.Two typical examples are the common use of " 其 ",and use zero reference to achieve reference.Secondly,in terms of demonstrative reference,there are nearly no differences between the use of "this" in the English legislative text and the use of "本" in the Chinese legislative text,which are both used to modify authoritative items.Besides,in terms of comparative reference,particular comparative reference is rarely used in the legislative texts in both languages while general comparative reference is more common and appears more often in English legislative texts in terms of occurrence number.At the theoretical level,this article analyzed the characteristics,similarities and differences in the use of reference items in Chinese and English,which makes up the gap of cohesive devices comparison in the professional legislative texts,and also broadens the research perspective for Chinese legislative language researchers and brings up new research ideas.At the practical level,this article summarizes some targeted translation strategies aboutreference items,which can be used as standards for translators to translate legal texts in the future,and can also help English or legal learners to learn English legislative texts better and faster.