A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Grammatical Cohesion In Translation

Cohesion, being a semantic concept, is one of the most distinguishing features of a text. Connected through cohesive devices, linguistic elements can be combined into an organic whole. Therefore, cohesion is generally regarded as the "visible network" of a text. As identified by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English, cohesion can be achieved through grammatical devices and lexical devices.With the application of text linguistics to the study of translation, the unit of translation has shifted from the word and sentence to the whole text. Cohesion is regarded as a necessary condition in text production and thus holds an important position in text translation. Translators' awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between the languages are crucial because they not only affect the translator's understanding of the source text but also influence the quality of the target text.With the development of discourse analysis and text translation studies, many scholars are conducting contrastive studies on English and Chinese cohesive devices and analyzing their significance in translation, but how the cohesive differences between the two languages affect the translation strategies are expected to be further discussed. This thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of grammatical cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts on the basis of Halliday& Hasan's theory and Zhu Yongsheng's study. The author takes an inductive approach to find out the basic reasons for differences in grammatical cohesive devices between the two languages from the perspective of linguistic systems and cultural traditions, and to systematically explore the translation strategies of achieving cohesion in textual translation. Because of the limitation of the space, we shall only discuss grammatical devices and related translation issues in this thesis.There are six chapters in the thesis.Chapter One is a brief introduction to the research background of cohesion theory, the relationship between cohesion and text linguistics as well as between cohesion and textual translation. It also includes the method, scope and significance of the thesis.Chapter Two is an introduction to the concept of text, texture and cohesion as well as to their respective functions in translation. Also it analyzes the differences in sentences and thematic structures between English and Chinese. The author states that the differences between the two languages as hypotaxis vs. parataxis, subject-prominent vs. topic-prominent language are the roots of the differences in cohesive devices.Chapter Three covers comparative study of the first three grammatical cohesive devices (reference, substitution, ellipsis) in English and Chinese and the influences of their differences on translation. Based on the differences, translation strategies are suggested: "omission", "amplification" and "lexical repetition"Chapter Four analyzes similarities and differences of conjunction between English and Chinese as cohesive devices and their influences on translation. For the main difference in explicitness and implicitness, "omission" and "amplification" in translating cohesive devices should be taken.Chapter Five summarizes explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion to achieve a coherent effect in textual translation. The translator should take both the implicit cohesion and explicit cohesion into consideration, and make a proper adjustment so as to make the translation conform to the norms of the target text.Chapter Six is the conclusion. It restates the main reason for cohesive device differences and concludes the thesis with a tentative summary of translation strategies on the basis of the contrastive analysis in the previous chapters.As lack of space forbids further developing the topic here, this thesis only deals with the four grammatical cohesive devices. Of course, there are other devices that are left untouched, whose uses also contribute to the cohesion of a text, such as lexical cohesion; parallelism and co-structure; theme-rheme; mood; tense and aspect. Therefore, this thesis is integral to the study of cohesion and more efforts are desired for the further discussion of the issue.