Contrastive Studies On English And Chinese Cohesive Devices And Their Impact On E-C Translation

Since the 1990s, many a translation theorist, both at home and abroad, has been applying text linguistics to translation studies in respect that these two branches have a lot in common: the description of the context above sentence level is attached great importance to in both fields. Cohesion, as one of the core linguistic features of text, has consequently been studied in the fields of both linguistics and translation.Although English and Chinese share a common classification of cohesive devices, which consists of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, disparities still dominate in their respective preference to certain cohesive ties. Since English prefers hypotaxis while Chinese parataxis, there is more explicit cohesion in English than in Chinese. This fact will naturally influence E-C translation of cohesive devices to a great extent. Therefore, it is very necessary to summarize the contrastive features of these cohesive devices and to point out their impacts on the E-C translation.However, the traditional comparison between Chinese and English cohesion is always a list of how many cohesive items each language contains. Little has been done to highlight the contrastive features of cohesion in Chinese and English. The influence of these contrastive features on E-C translation is seldom treated in a systematical way. On this account, this thesis attempts to study translation from perspective of text analysis by comparing the cohesive devices on the one hand and bringing forward their respective translating strategies on the other.Therefore, the methodology adopted in this paper stresses the contrastive study and the analysis of examples. First, based on the research carried out by Halliday and Chang Yaoxin, the contrastive study on cohesive devices is made and the features of the five cohesive devices are discussed. Then, grounded on a number of examples, efforts are made to analyze the influence of these differences on the understanding and expressing in the process of translation. The solutions will be summarized accordingly. Thus the main aim of this paper is to discuss the differences of cohesive devices in usage and the translation strategies.