On Application Of Cohesion Theory In Translation Of Medical English

Cohesion is one of the linguistic features of text and the core of the study of text linguistics or discourse analysis. Cohesion theory was first put forward by Halliday & Hasan in 1976. For quite a long time, many debates have been aroused among scholars about this theory and some researchers found there are many differences between English and Chinese in the cohesive devices. Then, similarly, in translation, we have to study the cohesion in the original text carefully, and then employ appropriate cohesive devices in the target language to reproduce an equally cohesive translation text.With the ever advancing development of text translation research, it is not difficult to find papers or books concerning comparison of English and Chinese cohesive devices and its application in translation, but most of them focus on ordinary texts and neglect sci-tech texts, especially medical texts. This thesis attempts to present a contrastive study of cohesion in medical English and Chinese, uses English and Chinese medical texts as the data, gets the similarities and differences and then guides the medical English translation activity .This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One serves as an introduction, in which the background, significance of the study, aims and objectives of the thesis are introduced in detail. In Chapter Two is the literature review of the concept and function of cohesion, the relationship between text linguistics and translation, cohesion and translation as well as general review on studies of medical English translation. Chapter Three analyzes the features of medical English, including lexical, syntactic and textual features. Chapter Four mainly tells about the'Contrastive Study of Cohesion in Medical English and Medical Chinese', bringing into focus on a variety of cohesive devices of texts---reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion and providing theoretical foundation in the perspective of text linguistics to E-C translation of medical texts. Chapter Five is devoted to principles in medical English translation and the proper handling of cohesion in E-C translation, with four suggestive translation techniques: reproduction, conversion, amplification and omission being exemplified. The conclusion is drawn in Chapter Six.