A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In English And Chinese Texts And Translation Strategies

With the development of text linguistics, translation has entered a new field—translation on the level of text. In other words, texts are the basic units in translation.Cohesion is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for the text production. Therefore, it occupies an important position in text translation.There are many differences in the cohesive devices between English and Chinese because these two languages belong to different language families: the Indo-European family and the Sino-Tibetan family, and their texts are produced in different culture context. For these differences, shifts and adjustments in cohesion are necessary to produce a fluent target text. Therefore, the thesis has a tentative attempt to have a contrastive study on the cohesive devices of English and Chinese to find their differences and the translation strategies involved in C-E translation.Specifically, the thesis has a contrastive study on structural cohesive devices including thematic structure and information structure, and non-structural cohesive devices including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Based on the contrastive studies, the thesis tries to find the C-E translation strategies, which are illustrated by a large number of examples cited from A Dream of Red Mansions and its English translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.The author hopes that the tentative study of the thesis will provide a keen insight into translation practice.