Contrastive Study Of Reference From The Perspective Of Translation

As an essential method of linguistic study, text analysis has received increasing attention since the late 1960s and early 1970s. And as an important feature of texture, cohesion becomes one of the key concepts of text analysis. In his Cohesion in English(1976), Halliday divides the cohesive devices in English into five categories, i.e. reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and gives out detailed explanation. As the mutual explanation relationship between reference item and referent in the text, reference is an important kind of cohesive devices, which is of high research value for its crucial role in achieving text coherence and certain descriptive effect of the text.On the other hand, comparison, as an important way of understanding things, emphasizes the importance of contrastive analysis in foreign language study in that only by comparison can the differences as well as similarities of different languages be classified and fore grounded. As the study of translation is closely related to the study of language and meaning, therefore the contrastive study of reference will contribute to the studies of translation. Given this, the present study tries to combine translation in light of and linguistics under their theoretical development.Based on Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion, the thesis uses oratorical texts as its data to conduct contrastive analysis on the reference items between English and Chinese. In addition to personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference are the most commonly recognized types of reference; zero reference is also included in the analysis as an equally essential category of reference, since it is a unique feature of Chinese language and demonstrates one of the most prominent differences between English and Chinese. Through analysis, the study finds that there are much more reference items in English than in Chinese. In Chinese, the reference relationship can be more flexibly realized through it own textual modes of coherence, such as lexical repetition and omission of the reference items. The flexibility of the reference in Chinese decides the variety of translation methods. In the process of translation, the translated reference items in Chinese may be different from the original items in English, but the meaning and the function of the reference items are still preserved, which can achieve the coherence of the text.