A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Grammatical Cohesive Devices And Its Translation

Cohesion, being a semantic concept, serves as an essential device to form a text like a tangible network embodied on the level of surface structure. Although English and Chinese share a common classification of cohesive devices, which mainly include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Because of the limitation of the space, we shall only discuss grammatical devices and related translation issues in this thesis. Three books are referred for theoretical basis: a) Cohesion in English by Halliday & hasan. b) Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese by Lian Shuneng. c) A contrastive Study of Cohesion in English and Chinese by Zhu Yongsheng. With the development of discourse analysis and text translation studies, many scholars are conducting contrastive studies onEnglish and Chinese cohesive devices and analyzing their significance in translation. This thesis is conducting a comprehensive study to fuse text linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation theory together on the basis of predecessors'studies. According to Halliday and Hasan's cohesive theory, it aims to probe into differences and similarities in cohesive devices between English and Chinese and try to explore the main factor causing their differences: English hypotaxis and Chinese parataxis. It also discusses the optimum manners of realizing the grammatical cohesion so that the translation which observes the grammatical rules in the target language will be achieved.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, which accounts for the significance, purpose and method of the study. Chapter Two reviews the literature of the previous studies on cohesion and some influential studies at home and abroad are presented. Chapter Three illustrates differences in cohesion between the two languages, which can be found based on a contrastive study on grammatical cohesive devices in The Scarlet Letter and its two Chinese versions with a qualitative approach. Chapter Four shows six chapters which are randomly sampled in both versions, with quantitative analysis to find out the frequency and proportion of grammatical cohesion devices in English and Chinese, which can test the difference mentioned above. Chapter Five is the analysis of the contrastive study, the main strategies for the translation of grammatical cohesive devices will be summarized. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis. English and Chinese grammatical cohesive devices bear similarities as well as great differences. The reasons can be illustrated from the aspects of culture and language features. Language has its own cultural characteristics, and different peoples in different cultures speak different languages. They have been affected by their cultures constantly, so as to acquire their specific cultural notions and ways of thinking. In terms of the language features, English and Chinese have their own special one. Many scholars believe that the most fundamental difference between the two languages as hypotaxis vs. parataxis, subject-prominent vs. topic-prominent language are the roots of the differences in grammatical cohesive devices, which result in the different features in choosing and using grammatical cohesive devices. In the translation of English and Chinese texts, the translator needs to find the proper methods to translate the grammatical cohesive devices in the texts in order to achieve the goal of cohesion and coherence. As lack of space forbids further developing the topic here, this thesis only deals with the four grammatical cohesive devices. Therefore, this thesis is partial to the study of cohesion and more efforts are desired for the further discussion of the issue.