| Nowadays there are three Chinese versions of Winesburg, Ohio, a masterpiece of Sherwood Anderson. Following the introduction, related literary studies on Winesburg, Ohio have seen a boom at home but few researches have been conducted on its Chinese translations. Besides, though the application of cohesion theory into translation studies has been common, most of them are confined to the transference of cohesive means through examples or the cohesion within an applied science article, and the research on the reproduction of cohesive ties in literary translations is rare. More importantly, as cohesion is the precondition for the production of a coherent, fluent and logical rendition, translators must have a clear understanding of the distinctions in cohesive means between the original language and target language. In view of this, the thesis is going to focus on a contrastive study of the reproduction of Winesburg, Ohio’s cohesive means in three Chinese versions.In1976, Halliday&Hasan divided cohesive ties into reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion in their co-published book Cohesion in English, which marked the establishment of cohesion theory. In Language, Context and Text (1985), Halliday and Hasan improved cohesion theory by subdividing it into non-structural cohesion and structural cohesion. The former preserved five cohesive means in Cohesion in English, while the latter included three parts:information structure, parallelism and thematic structure. Repetitive images, the frequent use of nouns and simple conjunctives such as "and, then" in the American novel, Winesburg, Ohio makes it unique in cohesion. Based on Halliday&Hasan’s classification of cohesion in Language, Context and Text, the thesis explores differences and similarities of three translators’ transference of cohesive means and analyzes potential factors which influence their strategies aiming to provide enlightening ideas for the transplantation of cohesive devices in future literary translation and prove the significance of cohesion in achieving textual equivalence.The thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter serves as the introduction, which includes the significance, research methods and organization of the thesis. Chapter two is about the literature review, including the development of cohesion theory, theoretical framework and related studies on cohesion and translation. Chapter three is the core of the thesis. The writer makes a comparative study of three Chinese versions of Winesburg, Ohio from the perspective of three translators’ choice of cohesive patterns. The comparison is conducted from two aspects:non-structural cohesion and structural cohesion. Based on chapter three, in chapter four differences and similarities in translators’ strategies have been discovered, and the influential factors have been summarized. Chapter five is the conclusion, the writer discovers that three translators tend to use lexical cohesion in transferring reference and verb substitution, omit some conjunctives in translating logical conjunctions, and preserve the cohesive devices when differences between SL and TL are not so striking. In differences of three translators’ strategies, they choose different words and expressive ways to reconstruct lexical cohesion, which leads to different rhetoric and cohesive effects. Apart from that, variations among three translators exist in the use of zero-anaphora and choice of thematic patterns. The writer has summarized that translators’awareness of differences of cohesion and language features between SL and TL, plus the consideration for readers, textual effects, and the original’s style contribute to discrepancies in three translators’ dealing with SL’s cohesion. It is concluded that translators have to take variations between English and Chinese cohesive devices, textual effects, the original’s style and receptor’s acceptability into account so that a piece of natural and coherent translation can be guaranteed. |
