A Study Of Chinese-English Translation Strategies:Based On Comparisons Between Chinese And English Cohesive Devices

With the rise of research popularity and practicality of textual linguistics and comparative textual studies,translation studies has been increasingly approached from the perspective of inter-lingual textual studies.Cohesion,as an inevitable topic in textual studies,indisputably plays an important role in translation studies.Due to the fundamental differences existing between Chinese and English thinking mode and social culture,the cohesive mechanism of the two languages is widely varied.Therefore,in the practice of translating Chinese into English,how to choose proper translation strategies to reconstruct the original Chinese textual cohesion in its English translation is a matter worthy of discussion.In this thesis,in order to find out such C-E translation strategies that can facilitate the reproduction in the English target text of the textual cohesion presented in the original Chinese text,we apply the theory of cohesion and the method of case analysis to comparing and analyzing the differences in cohesive devices between Chinese and English in four categories including reference,substitution and ellipsis,conjunction and lexical devices.Through the comparison,we find many interesting differences in the cohesive characteristics between Chinese and English,for example,while English features explicit conjunctive relations,Chinese features implicit conjunction;the phenomenon of zero anaphora in Chinese;the high tolerance for repetition of expressions in Chinese,which needs to be transformed into other cohesive devices when translated;and the differences in collocation due to each language's own cultural,psychological and traditional standing.These differences in turn enlighten us to harvest more insights about C-E translation strategies that would work to convey the cohesion between Chinese and English languages.Such translation strategies include first,adding cohesive device,which means adding conjunctives,personals and the omitted information in the ubiquitous ellipsis in Chinese;second,omitting cohesive device,which means leaving out repeated or similar information and expressions in Chinese in order to make the English translation more compact in both structure and meaning;third,transforming cohesive device,which is mainly about transforming repetition in Chinese into substitution,reference and synonymy in English and the transformation of collocation;fourth,rearranging text structure,which involves dividing a text into smaller sentence parts or combining sentences within a text into bigger unit for translation.In the end,we carry out a case analysis of the official translation work of President Xi's theme speech at the Summit of 2018 Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO)and find that translation strategies including adding cohesive device,omitting cohesive device,transforming cohesive device and rearranging text structure have been applied in the translation process in order to achieve successful and ideal C-E translation performance and effect,a further evidence in support of our four C-E translation strategies drawn from C-E cohesive device comparison.