A Contrastive Analysis Of The Cohesive Devices In Fortress Besiged And Its English Version From The Perspective Of Translation Equivalence

Nowadays, the focus of linguistic study has shifted from the level of sentence to text and thus text linguistics has developed rapidly. Inspired by text linguistics, people believe that translation studies should be carried out with text as the basic unit.As one of the important ties in composing a text, cohesion accordingly has begun to draw attention from linguists, among whom M.A.K. Halliday makes the greatest contribution to the construction of cohesion theory. In Cohesion in English (1976), he divides the cohesive devices in English into five categories including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and provides detailed explanation. Owing to its great explanatory power for cohesion, Halliday's theory has won widespread acceptance. In China, it is applied by scholars in researches of Chinese and makes some contribution to the translation studies.On the basis of the research achievements of the past and current linguists, this thesis demonstrates the similarities and differences in cohesive devices between English and Chinese from the perspective of translation equivalence. What distinguishes this thesis is that the contrastive study is carried out from the perspective of translation equivalence. Our attention is not only paid to cohesive devices but to how a translator can produce the closest, most natural target text equivalence between the language of English and Chinese.Taking into consideration the cohesive differences, a translator should comprehend the cohesive devices in the source text and make appropriate adjustments according to the norm of the target language and produce a cohesive and coherent text acceptable for the target readers.