Reference Study On Chinese And English Versions Of Report To The Eighteenth National Congress Of The Communist Party Of China

Since the book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan was published, cohesion has attracted lots of attention. Then this theory began to be used by many scholars in their researches. Most of them use the five types of cohesive devices:reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion as the theoretical structure to analyze various texts and find the similarities and distinctions among different texts. In recent years, political text has attracted many attention especially analyzing through the cohesive devices. In November2012, the eighteenth National Congress of Communist Party of China was held in Beijing and president Hu Jintao delivered this speech. Because this meeting is just held and few researches has been done on this topic especially using the cohesion theory, this thesis will take the eighteenth report as the object. In this thesis, the reference theory is used to analyze the Chinese and English version of the eighteenth National Congress report by manipulating Halliday and Hasan’s categorization for reference: personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference in order to find the distinctions of the cohesive devices in political text. Then some suggestions for the translation is put forward.Three kinds of reference are used:personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference to analyze the similarities and distinctions between the two versions of the report. The distinctions are mainly as follows:in the personal reference, English version of the report has high frequency of the personal reference than that of the Chinese version and there are reflexive personal reference in English version which does not exist in Chinese version; in the demonstrative reference, there is no big difference between two versions. The major distinction is the definite article "the" can be used as demonstrative reference while Chinese does not have definite articles; in the comparative reference, comparative and superlative form can be achieved through inflection in English while Chinese does not have inflection. Chinese can only achieve the comparative sense through adding the words such as "更"、"比"、"最"Analyzing from these distinctions, the reasons leading to these distinctions can be obtained. In terms of personal reference, Chinese has many subjectless sentences. Thus in translating them into English, the subject is added to the sentences. In terms of demonstrative reference, the differences in the grammar lead the distinctions in the particular reference. In terms of comparative reference, Chinese and English belong to the different family making the distinctions in the lexical’s inflection. Then some advices for translating this kind of text is given.There are seven parts in this thesis:the first part is the introduction which talks about the background information, the significance of the study and research questions and the layout of the thesis. The second part is the literature review which is about the previous study of political text and reference at home and abroad. The third part is the theoretical framework which states the definition of text, cohesion and cohesive devices, reference and classification of reference and then the linguistic features of reports to National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The fourth part is about the data collection and methodology. The fifth part is the contrastive study of Chinese and English versions of report to the eighteenth National Congress of Communist Party of China from the three aspects of reference. The sixth part is the implications for translation. The last part is the conclusion of the thesis.