A Cohesive Approach To Chinese-English Text Translation

Traditional translation studies view translation as a language transfer and put special emphasis on the"fidelity"to the source text. This research approach contributes too much attention to the equivalence of word or sentence level and neglects the important roles played by cohesion and coherence, which frequently leads to inflexible and blunt translation versions far away from the source text. The emergence of text linguistics as a new discipline in the twentieth century broadens the study of language to the level of text, studying translation from the perspective of text linguistics can handle the problems of information transfer at a higher level of linguistic structure.As a linguistic feature of the text, cohesion is the basis for a text to be understood. Cohesion is the visible network of the text, and it is displayed on the level of surface structure. On the other hand, coherence is the essence of cohesion and invisible network of the text. Coherence can be displayed in the deep structure of the text and be achieved through the way of logic induction.According to Halliday and Hasan's description of cohesion, this paper refers to grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices, with the former covering reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction, and the latter being made up of reiteration, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation .LaoShe is a world-famed outstanding representative of modern Chinese literature in the 20th century. His works are best known for the humor and satire in them,and his writing style wins universal praise for its vivid description and strong local color. LaoShe's works have been translated into twenty-four languages in all,with Camel Xiangzi into sixteen. However, researches on the translations of his works are comparatively rare.Based on such a situation,this thesis is to analyze ShiXiaojing's translation of Camel Xiangzi by employing Halliday and Hasan's theories of cohesion as its theoretical basis. The purpose of this paper is to find some basic rules in translation by analyzing the relevant examples and thereby exploring the differences of Chinese and English cohesive devices. By analyzing the cases of cohesion in the translation of Camel Xiangzi by Shi Xiaoqing in using these laws, we find that English version complies commendably with the cohesion norms of English. Although there are a few negotiable defects, her translation is acceptable and readable.