A Comparative Study Of Three Translation Versions Of Lolita: From A Text-Linguistics Perspective With Focus On Cohesion And Coherence

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is considered as one of the finest novels written in the20th century. This true masterpiece has been translated into many languages and itspopularity is still on the rise. There are nearly twenty Chinese versions of thetranslation of Lolita, but studies regarding its translation and evaluation of differentversions are strikingly lacking. Therefore, this thesis embarks on a task of acomparative study of three translation versions of Lolita in China.For a long time, in the academia of translation studies, most of the comparativestudies are concerned with traditional frameworks of evaluation, which merely judgethe quality of the Target Text (TT) from semantic, syntactic and discourseperspectives. For an objective text analysis of the three versions of Lolita's translation,the investigation in this thesis is conducted from a text linguistics perspective,focusing on cohesion and coherence in the texts under discussion.To carry out this investigation, this thesis first of all, introduces the main pointsthe writer aims to explore. Then in Chapter 1, it focuses on the theoretical basis of theapplication of text linguistics and cohesion and coherence to the translation studies. InChapter 2, this thesis mainly deals with the background research of Lolita the noveland its author, its plot, its theme and interpretations of its meaning and style. DifferentChinese versions of Lolita are also under survey. Chapter 3 proceeds with thecomparative analysis of both the Source Text (ST) and different TTs within theframework of text linguistics. The core analysis concerns cohesion feature of the textbased on the theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan, and the coherence featureapplying Paul Grice's Cooperative Principle. Therefore, the evaluation of the threeversions is achieved. Based on the results and findings arrived through text analysis,finally, this thesis concludes that the text linguistics framework based on cohesion andcoherence is instrumental to the creation of a faithful, effective, efficient andappropriate translation version of Lolita.