Adjustment Of Cohesive Means When Translating Contracts From English To Chinese

In recent years,with the rapid development of the discourse cohesion theory,cohesion,as one of the most important components of texts,has become one of the main research objects of textual analysis and thus aroused the interests of many linguists and scholars.However,few of them have guided translation practice by the discourse cohesion theory and endeavored to solve the practical problems of translation in accordance with the differences of Chinese and English languages,not to mention the application of this theory in legal translation,which is incompatible with the significant role that cohesion plays in text construction.In light of this,the current thesis,by adopting Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory as the framework and using two self-built corpuses which consist of contracts written in Chinese and English respectively,attempts to carry out both quantitative statistics interpretation and qualitative analysis on the similarities and differences of all sorts of cohesive devices(including reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction,reiteration and collocation)in English and Chinese contracts and to further figure out the translation strategies involved.Then,this thesis uses XX WAREHOUSE AND LOGISTICS SERVICE CONTRACT as an excellent example to figure out how to adjust cohesive devices in Chinese-English translation,so as to achieve the contextual effects of contracts written in English and improve the original translation.Findings of the theoretical discussion,comparative study and translation analysis of this thesis suggest that:(1)there are significant differences in the frequency distribution of the six cohesive devices in both Chinese and English contracts;(2)although the cohesive devices commonly used in Chinese and English contracts are quite similar,the most frequently used ones are different,with reiteration and reference being most commonly used in Chinese and English contracts respectively;(3)as for the Chinese-English translation of contracts,the adjustments of cohesive devices are mainly reflected in the following ones: demonstrative reference,ellipsis,substitution,and some of the lexical cohesions.