A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices Between Chinese And English And Translation

In recent years, the study of translation has enlarged from the level of words and sentences to the level of texts. The study of translation is done from the perspective of texts, which can deal with the information reproduction. Cohesion is one of the important parts of texts and it is a visible network of texts, which is displayed on the surface structure of texts. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is a semantic concept, and they hold that cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text. In their book Cohesion in English (1976), Halliday and Hasan classify cohesive devices into grammatical cohesive device and lexical cohesive device:the former includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction; the latter consists of reiteration and collocation.Different languages have different preferences and use frequencies of cohesive devices. The study on translation should be started with the level of texts and the differences of the cohesive devices between the texts of the source language and the target language should be compared so as to instruct the translators to make some transfers in translation. This thesis takes a lot of examples from the literary works of Luxun (the translated versions are mainly done by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang), and does a contrastive study on the cohesive devices in English and Chinese. This thesis also discusses some translation skills and rules.This thesis is generally divided into four chapters. Besides the introduction, the first chapter gives a brief survey of cohesion theory, including the development history of cohesion theory and some basic concepts, text, texture, cohesion, coherence and the relationship between cohesion and coherence.The second chapter explores the influences of cohesion theory in the field of translation and the two processes of translation.The third chapter focuses on the English-Chinese differences of cohesive devices, mainly those of reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In this chapter, many examples are supplied and some translating strategies and methods are closely examined.The last chapter serves as a conclusion part.