Textual Cohesion And Translation

This thesis is an attempt to discuss the differences in cohesive devices between English and Chinese and their influence on English-Chinese translation. With the emergence and development of text linguistics since the 1960s, a lot of scholars have shifted their translation research to the textual level. Taking translation as a dynamic interlingual communication and texts the basic units in communication, they hold that texts are the basic units in translation and the essential objects of translation studies. In order to realize the dynamic communication between different languages, the translator should, on the premise of correctly analyzing and expressing the meaning of the original text, try to produce a natural translation with all of the features that make it recognizable as a native text. To tell a text from a non-text, Beaugrande and Dresslor (1981) put forward the notion of "textuality", which refers to the complex set of features that texts must have to be considered texts in communication. Textuality has seven standards: intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informativity, coherence, cohesion, and intertextuality, among which cohesion and coherence are the most important. The cohesive text is, as a result, the end product of translation. Since each language has developed its particular devices that are by no means the same as those of other languages, the translator should create cohesion in the target text using the cohesive devices acceptable to receptors in order to attain a natural target text. To achieve this, the translator should have a keen awareness of the contrastive results in cohesive devices between the source and the target languages and their influence on translation. As far as English and Chinese are concerned, although they enjoy the same classification in cohesive devices and some similarities in their usage, these do not exclude discrepancies. The differences between English and Chinese such as English favors hypotaxis and Chinese parataxis, English is subject-prominent and Chinese topic-prominent will inevitably result in discrepancies in their cohesive devices. Where discrepancies exist, adjustments and shifts in cohesive devices are necessary for producing a natural target text, which form one of the major sources of difficulties occurring in translation. Therefore, this thesis focuses on analyzing the differences in cohesive devices between English and Chinese and corresponding shifts and adjustments necessarily involved in E-C translation in order to achieve a highest degree of naturalness in translation. Cohesion is understood in both a narrow sense and a broad one. The present paper studies cohesion in the latter approach and adopts a cohesion model including both semantic and structural cohesion.