On C-E Translation Of The White Papers Of China’s National Defense From The Perspective Of Textual Cohesion

Since the1960s, the great achievement in study of text linguistics has attracted the attention of researchers and scholars in translation studies who have applied theories of text linguistics to translation study. Text linguistics has provided a new perspective for translation study.To tell a text from a non-text, Beaugrande and Dresslor (1981) put forward the notion of "textuality", which consists of seven standards, among which cohesion and coherence are the most important. This theory turned out to be of great significance to translation studies.Being the kernel of text linguistics, the cohesion theory has been applied by many translators at home and abroad. Textual cohesion can be understood in both a broad sense and a narrow one. Cohesion in the broad sense denotes all the linguistic relationships that bind various surface elements in a text together. In the narrow sense, it denotes the semantic connections between various forms in a text. Anyway, cohesion is one of the most distinguishing features of a text. Connected through cohesion, linguistic elements can be combined into an organic whole. Therefore, it is generally considered as the "visible network" of a text.The well-known British linguists Halliday and Hasan have made the greatest contribution to cohesion theory. In1976, in their co-worked publication Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan classified cohesion into grammatical cohesion and lexical one and divided the cohesive devices in English into five categories:reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, and provided detailed explanation. Owing to its great explanatory power for cohesion, Halliday and Hasan’s theory has won widespread acceptance in later research.In their Language, Context and Text (1985), Halliday and Hasan expanded the scope of cohesion, and divided cohesion into structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion. Grammatical cohesion and lexical one they expounded previously can be considered as semantic cohesion and belong to non-structural cohesion.To put it simply, textual cohesion can be divided into two categories:semantic cohesion and structural cohesion, both with their subsets.Many articles and books on cohesive devices in translation from different perspectives have been published, but most of them are confined only to a certain kind of cohesive device, a comprehensive and systematic study on textual cohesive devices of the translation for a political text, especially the case study of C-E translation of the White Papers of China’s National Defense is rare.Every language has its own unique ways of cohesion. The natural and fluent version requires the translator’s to have good command of the different cohesive devices between languages and flexibly transfer them in their translation. Although Chinese and English enjoy some similarities in their usage, they do not exclude discrepancies which deserve our great attention. Chinese favors parataxis and English hypotaxis. English is subject-prominent and Chinese topic-prominent. These differences will inevitably result in discrepancies in their cohesive devices. Where discrepancies exist, adjustments and shifts in cohesive devices are necessary for producing a natural target text, which form one of the major difficulties in translation.After adopting the main fruits in textual cohesion of the scholars home and abroad and based on the theoretical framework of cohesion in the narrow sense proposed by Halliday and Hassan, this thesis attempts a systematic, comprehensive and contrastive study on C-E translation of the White Papers of China’s National Defense from the perspective of textual cohesive devices. This thesis only focuses on grammatical and lexical cohesion. It uses many examples of differences between Chinese and English in terms of cohesive devices in the hope of demonstrating and testing the feasibility and significance of textual cohesive devices in translation.By contrastive analysis of cohesive devices in the two languages of the White Papers of China’s National Defense, the main findings of this thesis lie in that if the literal correspondence may result in equally cohesive effect, then no adjustments in form are needed. When correspondence can not be achieved and discrepancies exist, shifts and adjustments are necessary. The discrepancies are mainly embodied as follows:Firstly, Chinese uses less reference items than English does. Under most circumstances, the translator should supplement them in the English translation. Secondly, Chinese prefers covert cohesion while English prefers overt cohesion. The covert conjunctions used in the Chinese source texts are often supplemented in their English versions. Thirdly, Chinese favors repetition more than English does in using lexical devices, while English normally prefers to use more synonyms.As lack of space forbids further developing the topic here, this thesis only deals with the semantic cohesion but lacks thorough analysis of the structural cohesion for which more efforts are desired for further study.