A Comparative Study On Cohesion Between English And Chinese Texts And Its Translation Straegies

Cohesion is normally defined as the use of lexical and grammatical or structural devices to guarantee text integrity and coherence. A number of researchers have attempted to provide a systematic and theoretical account of how speakers of English come to identify a text. Many linguists have done systematic research on cohesion since1960s, but the most influential one of this kind of research was done by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan in their book Cohesion in English. Their study is regarded as a great contribution to the research of text.The thesis is divided into five parts. The first part of the thesis is general introduction about research background, research purpose and significance. Many linguists have done systematic research on cohesion since1960s, but the most influential one of this kind of research was done by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan in their book Cohesion in English. Cohesion theory also attracted the interest from many other linguists and their researches are also fruitful such as Discourse Analysis by Brown&Yule, Discourse Cohesion and Coherence by Hu Zhuanglin, A Contrastive Study of Cohesion in English and Chinese by Zhu Yongsheng, Zheng Lixin and Miao Xingwei, etc. The research work done on cohesion and text translation in English and Chinese by many scholars at home and abroad has a great impact on the study in this field and has both theoretical and practical values in translation practice.The second part summarizes several mainstream linguistic theories about cohesion research explaining the theories the thesis is based on. In1962, Halliday is the first to put forward the concept of cohesion turning it from normal vocabulary into a linguistic term. Later in1968Hasan did more detailed research in her book Grammatical Cohesion in Spoken and Written English. Finally in1976in the book of Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan provided a systematic and thorough analysis on cohesion theories.In the third part, differences in cohesive devices will be analyzed in a detailed comparative study between Chinese and English texts. According to the classification by Halliday and Hasan, the thesis analyzes the difference one by one between the application of cohesive devices in English and Chinese. There are various differences such as the distinction between personal pronouns of English and Chinese which show different gender, number and degrees of respect and the addresses in some Chinese literature works are usually repeatedly used to show difference while in English version the addresses are omitted or substituted by personal pronouns and etc..With the application of text linguistics to the study of translation, the scale of translation research has moved from the word and sentence to the whole text. Based on the study in the third part, the fourth part will provide solutions on translation methods and strategies of cohesive devices. Through retaining cohesive devices, adding or omitting cohesive devices, transforming cohesive devices, adjusting text structure, reversing logic order and shifting from Topic-comment to Subject-predicate, the transference between English and Chinese will be fluent.Eventually, the whole thesis will come to an end in the fifth part concluding all the research in the thesis. English is a hypotactic language which emphasizes grammatically well-formed sentences containing explicit connecting markers. However, Chinese is a paratactic language which attaches more focus on the expression of meaning through implicit ways and the reader’s or listener’s ability of logical analysis is decisive to the integrated understanding of the text.The thesis analyzes the differences between Chinese and English texts and the reasons why the differences exist and discusses the translation methods and strategies for cohesive devices revealing the different trends and rules of Chinese and English.