A Comparative Study On Cohesive Devices Between English Texts And Their Chinese Translations

With the further development of text linguistics, its theoretical results extend gradually toward the field of textual translation. As the core of text linguistics, cohesive devices have been drawing more and more attention in the textual translation. As is known to all, cohesion is one of the important features in a text, netting each language compositions into an organic whole. Thus cohesion is called a tangible network of a text, and reflected in the surface structure of discourse. In their book Cohesion in English (1976), Halliday and Hasan, Britain's famous linguists, define cohesion as a semantic concept, showing semantic relations in the text. What's more, they also divide cohesion into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion, the former consisting of reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunctions while the latter composed of some lexical devices including repetition, synonymy, superordinate & hyponymy, general words and collocation.Due to the different cohesive devices in English and Chinese texts, cohesion is always regarded as a measurement of the translation quality. Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, this thesis takes the famous British novel Wuthering Heights and its Chinese version, translated by Fang Ping as the sample and analyses inductively the similarities and differences of five cohesive devices in English and Chinese texts with abundant contrast examples. It is aimed at exploring the causes of the differences and their effects on E-C translation, especially the corresponding strategies, and ensuring E-C text coherence with appropriate cohesion in different language structures.In line with Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, and by exploring the differences of cohesive devices in English and Chinese texts, the thesis provides evidence for the assertion that the major causes of the differences derive from the nature of the two languages, i.e. English is mainly hypotactic while Chinese is paratactic. In view of this, some translation strategies are proposed to deal with the transition of different cohesive devices so as to achieve efficient translation and to ensure coherent text in the E-C translation, with the purpose to provide some references to FL students, teachers and translators.