Cohesion And Translation

The thesis mainly bases its theoretical framework on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory in the book Cohesion in English, and further integrates extensive contrastive studies on cohesion in English and Chinese. It undertakes a case study of Ian McEwan's Atonement and Guo Guoliang's translated version in order to illustrate the contributions of cohesion to the translation practice.A lot of examples are analyzed in great detail under each subcategory of the five cohesive devices, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Similarities and differences concerning cohesion in English and Chinese are drawn upon to examine the translation of each cohesive type. The analysis of cohesion turns out to be of critical importance to the overall comprehension of the source text, hence a practical decision-maker in the dilemmas of translation.Generally speaking, Guo's translation is neither quite sensitive to the means of cohesion beyond the scope of sentences nor conscious enough to reproduce the cohesive effects. Through the case study, the thesis aims to provide a better picture of the cohesive devices in both English and Chinese, and to call greater attention to their contributions in producing a correct, precise, natural and idiomatic translation.