Cohesion In Translation

Cohesion has been of great concern in the linguistic and the translation circle since the establishment of cohesion theory in the 1970s marked by the publication of M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976). Many linguists and scholars have been studying it and have tried to establish the relation between cohesion and linguistics and translatology and the importance in the creation of a text. Cohesion, seen as a necessary condition in text production, thus holds an important position in text translation. Translators' awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between the languages are crucial since they do not only affect translators' understanding of the source text, but also influence the quality of their target text.With the development of discourse analysis and text translation studies, the coverage of cohesion has gradually expanded, and researchers are investigating the roles that cohesion plays in various fields, such as reading, writing, text type, stylistics and translation. Many are also conducting contrastive studies on English and Chinese cohesive devices and analyzing their significance in translation. But how to operate the cohesive devices in the translating process is still in need of systematic discussion, and how the cohesive differences between the two languages affect translation strategies in the translation practice should be further combed and perfected. Since each language has developed its particular devices that are by no means the totally same as those of other languages, the translator should create cohesion in the target text using the cohesive devices acceptable to receptors in order to attain a natural target text. To achieve this, the translator should have a keen awareness of the contrastive results in cohesive devices between the source and the target languages and their influence on translation. Where discrepancies exist, adjustments and shifts in cohesive devices are necessary for producing a natural target text, which forms one of the major sources of difficulties occurring in translation. Therefore, based on cohesion theory, taking the Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions (in Hawkes' translation it is translated as The Story of the Stone and hereinafter we use A Dream of Red Mansions to refer to it in the body part) and the versions of David Hawkes and John Minfold (which is hereinafter referred to as Hawkes) and Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang as the experimental case, this thesis attempts to briefly describe the differences on cohesion between Chinese and English, to analyze the factors which bring about those dissimilarities, and to systematically discuss the corresponding shifts and adjustments necessarily involved in Chinese-English translation in order to achieve a maximum degree of naturalness in translation.The methodology adopted in this paper stresses the contrastive study and the analysis of examples. There are four chapters in all and the layout of the whole thesis goes like the following:ChapterⅠis a brief review and introduction of cohesion and the literatures on the theory both at home and abroad; ChapterⅡanalyzes the differences in thinking modality, sentence and thematic structures between Chinese and English. The author holds that such differences between the two languages are the roots of the differences in cohesive devices; ChapterⅢis the pivot of this study, wherein the original work and two English versions of A Dream of Red Mansions are taken as the case to study through the analysis of abundant examples, this chapter makes a description and contrast of the cohesive devices in Chinese and English translation mainly from the category of structural cohesion device to find out the differences as well as similarities between the Chinese and English cohesive devices and some of the rules in the translation of cohesive devicese. Finally, there comes the ChapterⅣ—the conclusion part based on the above-mentioned discussion and description.