| Moment in Peking, which is compared to A Dream of Red Mansions in modern times, has been regarded as one of the most famous English novels created by Dr. Lin Yutang, a master in both Chinese and western culture. This novel depicts the profound changes of Chinese society from the Boxers Uprising (1900) to Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) through the description of three large families in Peking—the Yao Family, the Tseng Family and the New Family. It is a vivid reflection of China's reality and a direct disclosure of the feudal warlord and brutality of Japanese.About this English written novel, there have been several Chinese versions. However, towering all these translations are two:Zhang Zhenyu's Jing Hua Yan Yun and Yu Fei's Shun Xi Jing Hua. Zhang Zhenyu is an English professor at Taiwan University. He has been concentrating on translating Dr. Lin Yutang's English works into Chinese. Most of his translations received a warm welcome among Chinese people. Zhang's version has two volumes and he adds a headline to each chapter in each part. Every headline is composed of two antithetic couplets of about seven to eleven characters, summing up the general idea of the corresponding chapter. Yu Fei is the son of the famous Chinese man of letters—Yu Dafu. Yu Fei wholeheartedly commited himself to doing a faithful translation and capturing the flavor of old Beijing.About Dr. Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking and its Chinese versions, many scholars and students have studied them from different perspectives, for example, from philosophy, aesthetics, culture, etc.. However, few of them have conducted them from cohesion in a discourse. This thesis, based on M. A. K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), makes a comparative study on cohesion between the two above-mentioned Chinese versions of Moment in Peking through discourse analysis. According to Halliday, there are three metafunctions of language:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. In textual metafunction, cohesion is discussed. Cohesion is very important to make a discourse or text coherent, and coherence can be achieved mainly through four types of cohesive ties, namely, reference, ellipsis and substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. For this thesis only aims at shedding light on the importance of discourse analysis, especially the application of cohesive ties while reading and writing, it will only work at some of the cohesive ties used in the two Chinese versions.From a comparative study of the two Chinese versions, the author finds out that on the application of cohesive ties and the representation of Chinese culture, Yu Fei's version is a better one; while on the fluency of language and the description of plots, Zhang Zhenyu's version gets the upper hand. This thesis only discusses the aspect of cohesion, therefore the author reckons that Yu Fei did a better job.The author hopes translators can bear cohesion in mind when conducting Chinese and English translation, and at the same time, can notice the difference of cohesion between the two kinds of languages. Besides, she hopes this thesis can arouse translators'awareness of textual competence, which can make them put the theory of discourse analysis into the application of translation in future. |
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