A Comparative Study On Cohesion In The Translation Of Tian Wen

With profound content and unique art form,Tian Wen can be said to be an extraordinary and eternal masterpiece.In a free form,being succinct and condensed,and being intricate but well-arranged,it is written in chronological order with contents methodically well-organized.With its unique form,flexible sentence structure and skillful textual organization,Tian Wen is known for its difficulty because of the uncertain meaning of some words,the unknown mythology and the discussion that whether the text is out of order.In the original text of Tian Wen,in terms of lexical features,some words' meaning is uncertain and some mythologies are now unknown;in terms of syntactic features,the sentence structure is flexible that the subject or the object is often omitted,and sentences ended with ? are frequently used;in terms of textual features,the poem is abstruse with heavy parataxis nature,and although there is no cohesive markers in Tian Wen,the contents are well-organized and the sentences are closely linked by semantic relations.Because of the different employment of cohesive devices between Chinese and English text,the shift of the cohesive devices needs attention.To translate Tian Wen translators need to choose cohesive devices based on the features of original poem and the target language.In this way,the translations can reproduce the features of original poem and convey the poem to the target readers equivalently and naturally.Based on the framework of cohesion theory,taking the two English translations of Tian Wen by Xu Yuanchong and Gopal Sukhu as examples,this paper analyzes the cohesive devices used by the two translators and attempts to answer the two questions:1.What are the similarities and differences between the two translations in terms of cohesive devices?2.What are the implications of features of the cohesive devices used by two translations to English translation of Chinese classics?This paper found that there are similarities in using cohesive devices in the two translations.The two translations use many cohesive devices to create corresponding cohesion in Tian Wen which reproduce the original style and rhetorical effects.Both grammatical and lexical devices are employed to the two translations,especially references and reiterations.Besides,in the two translations,no ellipsis is employed.Moreover,based on the stylistic features and the differences of cohesive devices between Chinese and English,the two translations add many grammatical and lexical devices which manifest the semantic relation between different sentences and achieve as much as the cohesion hidden inside the semantic relation in the original poem,thus the two translations increase their readability and comprehensibility.There are still some differences between the two translations in terms of cohesive devices.First of all,the use of cohesive devices in Gopal Sukhu is significantly higher than that in Xu Yuanchong's translation.Among them,Gopal Sukhu's translation uses more grammatical cohesive devices than Xu does,such as reference and conjunction,while the lexical cohesive devices in Xu's translation are used more frequently than those in Gopal Sukhu's translation,such as reiteration.Besides,Gopal's translation follows the original poem and uses corresponding cohesive devices,while Xu's translation sometimes flexibly changes the cohesive devices of the original text or omits them by adjusting the sentence patterns.By using cohesive markers,the two translations retain the stylistic features and rhetorical effects of the original text by reproducing the cohesion of the original text,and by adding cohesion means the two translations reconstruct the sentence structures which conform to English grammar,making the semantic relation closely connected and conveying the mythological value contained in the original text accurately and completely.In consequence,in the translation of classical books,especially poetry,the translator should follow the following translation strategies in order to accurately and idiomatically convey the original text.Firstly,based on the explicit cohesion in the original text,translation needs to reproduce the cohesive devices and stylistic features of the original text.Secondly,translation should convey the rich information contained in the original text by virtue of cohesive devices.Thirdly,on account of the differences between Chinese and English that Chinese is parataxis-prominent while English is hypotaxis-prominent,in the process of English translation,cohesive devices that conform to the habits of the target language readers should be added to reproduce the implicit cohesion of the original text,so as to make the translation cohesive and fluent,and then increase the readability and comprehensibility of the translation.