A Contrastive Study On Grammatical Cohesive Devices Of Familiar Essays In Chinese And English And Their Translation Strategies

This thesis is based on the Grammatical Cohesion Theory, which was advanced byM. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan. According to Halliday and Hasan, grammatical cohesivedevices (GCDs) are comprised of reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Thisdissertation presents eighteen familiar essays that were extracted from Zhang Peiji’sSELECTED MODERN CHINESE ESSAY1,2,3, written by modern Chinese writers, andtranslated by Zhang Peiji. The current thesis contrasts the use of GCDs of Chinese withthose of English by adopting the research methodology of Mann-Whitney U test, exploresthe most important reasons which cause the differences, and puts forward their matchingtranslation strategies.Through the contrastive study, we found these results:(a) There is no significantdifference of the total number of GCDs in Chinese familiar essays (CFEs) and Englishfamiliar essays (EFEs);(b) Reference, along with Demonstrative Reference, has a higherfrequency of use in English than in Chinese;(c) Substitution and Ellipsis, especiallyNominal Ellipsis, have a higher frequency of use in Chinese than in English;(d)Conjunctions have no obvious distinction between the frequency of usage in Chinese andEnglish, most likely due to conjunctions that are often implicit in Chinese and explicit inEnglish.In addition, by the results of the present study, we also believe that the most mainreasons for the differences between the use of Chinese and English GCDs lies in theparataxis of Chinese and hypotaxis of English. The differentiation between parataxis andhypotaxis will cause differences in the performance between Chinese and English and bring difficulty in the translation from Chinese to English, and vice versa. Therefore, moreattention should be paid to these dissimilarities and to their concrete translation strategies,so that we can further improve the quality of a translation.Looking at the differences from the usage of GCDs of familiar essays in Chinese andEnglish, we argue that their corresponding translation strategies are mainly composed offive aspects. They are that (a) as a general rule, if a noun reappears, it tends to be repeatedin Chinese while it is usually replaced with personal or demonstrative reference in English;(b) zhe (in Chinese character:这; in English: this) in Chinese is frequently translated into“that” in English;(c) in terms of substitution, the single or plural form of a noun as well asthe tense of a verb, is taken into consideration in English, whereas it is unnecessary to doso in Chinese;(d) Chinese has the preference for nominal ellipsis, however, English hasthe tendency to adopt personal and demonstrative reference;(e) the conjunctions inChinese are often covert although it is overt in English.The present research not only enriches the content of cohesion theory, but alsoexpands the range of the contrastive study between Chinese and English. Meanwhile, thisresearch supplies E-C and C-E translation, language teaching, and the study of stylisticswith some guidance and reference value.