Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Reference And Their Translation Strategies

Cohesion has received great attention in the linguistic circle since cohesion theorywas first put forward by Halliday and Hasan in the book Cohesion in English in 1976.Scholars both at home and abroad have made many researches concerning this theoryfrom different perspectives. It is believed that cohesion is one of essential conditions fortext forming. In recent years, scholars have started to make contrastive studies on thetext feature of cohesion and made great achievements. However, few domesticresearches focus on the certain cohesive device of reference for an in-depth andsystematic exploration. Besides, most of contrastive studies simply rest on the surfacewithout exploring the inherent differences of languages as well as the causes of suchdifferences.Based on Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion, the thesis draws the materialfrom English classic novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Gone with the Wind, WutheringHeights and Pride and Prejudice ( two chapters are selected at random in each novel)and three famous short stories The last Leaf , Magi's Gift and Running for theGovernor and their corresponding Chinese versions to serve as corpus. These abundantexamples illustrate a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese reference systems,which generally include personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparativereference, in order to find the differences between them along with the underlyingreasons and put forward some effective strategies of translating reference items.Through the contrastive study, major differences between English personalreference systems and Chinese personal reference systems are summarized as follows: (1)third personal pronouns are used more frequently in English than those in Chinese andzero reference is used more often in Chinese; (2) There are two kinds of reflexives inChinese. One is"personal +自己"and the other is"自己".There is no counterpart of"自己"inEnglish;(3)Englishhasrelativepronounsandittorealizetextualcohesion,whichis the unique usage in English. As for the demonstrative reference, English that andChinese"这"are used more often than English this and Chinese"那". English also hasunique usage in demonstrative reference―the while Chinese can combinedemonstrative pronouns with personal pronouns to perform cohesive ties. Thedifferences between English and Chinese comparative reference exist in particularcomparison. Particular comparison in English is generally fulfilled by means of itsunique comparative degrees of adjectives and adverbs while lexical and grammatical ways are adopted because Chinese has no such comparative degrees. All thesedifferences result from the different thinking models of westerners and Chinese and thedistinct language structures of English and Chinese.The thesis further puts forward ways of translating reference items in English-Chinese translation. Omission of personal reference, repetition of the referent andreplacement of reflexives or demonstratives can be applied in personal pronountranslation. Psychological factors as well as temporal and spatial distance in real worldhave to be taken into consideration in the translation of English demonstratives that, this,the. The function that comparative degrees serve in English can be realized in Chinesethrough lexical devices or grammatical structures of comparative meaning.