Cohesive Devices And C-E Translation Quality

The past decade has witnessed an immense growth in text linguistics and contrastive linguistics. The achievements of text linguistics have been brought into the study of the translation theory in order to give some guidance to translation practice. The cohesion theory, one of the important achievements of text linguistics, has been given the great concern in the field of translation. With the application of text linguistics to translation studies, the unit of translation has shifted from the word and sentence to the whole text.Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which link various parts of a text. These relations or cohesive devices organize and, to some extent, create a text with coherence. Cohesion is seen as a necessary condition in text production and thus holds an important position in text translation. Therefore, translators'awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between the source language and the target language are crucial because they not only affect the translator's understanding of the source text but also influence the quality of the target text. For the accurate and fluent translation, the quality of translation depends on whether the translator has the awareness of cohesive devices and can use cohesive devices properly and effectively. Thus, cohesive devices have the correlation with translation quality theoretically.The cohesive devices analyzed in the present thesis include five types: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, which are classified by Halliday and Hasan in their Cohesion in English. The samples used in this research are 40 translations chosen from the junior English majors. All the samples are marked from the perspective of cohesive devices. Data from"G"group and"P"group is processed, using the SPSS software. Descriptive analysis and T-test are used to compare the performance of two groups in the use of cohesive devices and correlation analysis is used to find out whether there is the correlation between cohesive devices and translation quality. The findings of the present research show clearly that in C-E translation, there exists the correlation between cohesive devices and the students'translations quality. Among all five cohesive devices, substitution and lexical cohesion have the significant correlation with translation quality, while reference, ellipsis and conjunction seem to have no significant correlation with translation quality. Good translations and poor ones are different in the use of the above mentioned cohesive devices, which lead to the differences in translation quality and thus distinguish the high quality translations from the low ones.Thus the greater importance should be attached to the contrast of cohesive devices between English and Chinese in the process of teaching translation.