A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices Differences In Translation From Chinese To English And College English Translation

Since1960s, the development of text linguistics has greatly enriched the research and studies on translation theory. As pointed out by Wills(Wills,1982:112), the translator does not translate words or individual sentences (unless an isolated sentence has text status), but texts. Translation, therefore, is a text-oriented event. In this way, translation should not be limited to the literal translation at lexical and syntactic level but be expanded to the text level.A text should meet seven standards of textuality:cohesion, coherence, intentionality and acceptability, informativity, situationality, intertextuality. Among them, cohesion is of great significance. Halliday and Hasan think that cohesion occurs when the semantic meaning of an element in a discourse requires the interpretation of another. Cohesion, in its very essence, refers the semantic relations it brings about in the text.Cohesion is, on one hand, a feature to evaluate a text and on the other hand a key criterion that decides the acceptability of the text. Cohesion provides the continuity needed to the full comprehension of a text, which is the foundation of transition. Meanwhile, the translated text has to be textual as well. This means that the translator not only must have a careful consideration of the cohesions in the source language, but also should consider the differences of the cohesive devices in the source language and target language and then properly transfer the cohesion so as to get a cohesive translation. Different languages have different cohesions. This thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences of the cohesive devices in English and Chinese.Halliday and Hasan divide cohesions into two kinds:grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The former includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction while the latter includes reiteration and collocation. The thesis makes a contrastive analysis on the differences and transfers of the cohesions in English and Chinese with practical examples and find how the similarities and differences of cohesive devices affect translation. With a lot of examples excerpted from New Horizon College English for Reading and Writing, this thesis explores the influence of cohesion exerted on the teaching of college English translation, which provides practical teaching materials and methods for college English teachers.