On The Translation Of The Scholars

Before the concept of text in text linguistics was introduced into translation study, the evaluation of translation quality was still confined in the comparison of word-to-word or sentence-to-sentence correspondence between source and target texts. After the 1970s, however, many translation theorists began to recognize the importance of text in translation activities. They came to realize that what the translator should work with was not words or sentences in isolation but an organic unity of text for the purpose of communication and thus text should be the strategic decision making rank in translation operation.Being one of the seven standards of textuality, cohesion is the first priority in the formation of a text. Cohesion weaves sentences into an integrated unity and makes it fluent, and coherent. In text translation, cohesion is directly related to the quality of translation in that it is inevitable in understanding the original text and restructuring the target text. Due to the differences in culture and language itself, Chinese and English have a lot of differences between cohesive devices. For this reason, transference and adjustment must be adopted in C-E translation in order to obtain an equivalent target text which is cohesive in structure and coherent in meaning.This thesis, under the theoretical framework proposed by Halliday and Hasan, attempts to have a contrastive study on the cohesive devices in Chinese and English texts and discusses their differences and their influence on C-E translation. In order to illustrate the differences, the author cites a large number of examples from The Scholars and its English version translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.The whole thesis is divided into four parts. In the first part, the author has an overview of the origin and development of the cohesion theory as well as its application in text translation. In the second part, the importance of cohesion in text formation is emphasized and the feasibility of taking text as basic translation unit is demonstrated. Moreover, textual equivalence as a criterion of translation quality evaluation is also a key point. The third and fourth parts deal with the specific contrastive studies on cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts. In the third part, large numbers of examples are cited according to the sub-categories of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Through contrastive analyses, the author summarizes the differences in each category and expatiates the reasons for these differences from the aspects of culture, psychology and the influence of language evolution. The fourth part mainly focuses on reiteration of lexical cohesion. It points out that repetitions in Chinese texts are often transferred into other grammatical cohesive devices or rendered into other forms of lexical cohesive devices for equivalent textual effect.