A Study On The Translation Methods Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

Since it was first put forward by Halliday and Hasan in1976, cohesion has been a formal term of linguistics. It is not only important to linguistic study but also essential to translation study. Cohesion plays an indispensable part in creating texture of a text. Therefore, how to reproduce the cohesion of the source text in the target text is a key step of translation process.According to Halliday and Hasan, the devices used to achieve cohesion can be classified into two kinds:grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices. Grammatical cohesive devices can be further divided into four subcategories: reference, substitution, ellipse and conjunction while lexical cohesive devices include reiteration and collocation. In the past years, many studies went to grammatical cohesive devices, but few to lexical ones. The cohesive effect achieved by lexical cohesive devices, however, is not less important than that of grammatical ones.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s theory, this thesis makes a brief contrastive study on the lexical cohesive devices between English and Chinese by taking Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and its Chinese version translated by Ma Aixin as study object. By analyzing this book and its Chinese translation, the similarities and differences of each lexical cohesive device between English and Chinese have been presented and only by knowing these differences and similarities can we translate these lexical cohesive devices smoothly from the source language into the target language.On the basis of Ma’s translation, the writer summarizes six translation strategies for translating lexical cohesive devices, which are equivalent translation, combination, amplification, addition, omission and transformation. Among these six translation methods, equivalent translation has been employed with the highest frequency in the translation of each kind of lexical cohesive device. General word along with super-ordinate adopts only equivalent translation. And Due to the differences of the nature and cultural background between English and Chinese, not every lexical item in English can find a closest equivalent one in Chinese, so combination, amplification, omission, addition and transformation can be chosen to fit in the needs.