A Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices Applied In The Chinese And English Versions Of Three Kingdoms

As the first Chinese serial novel, Three Kingdoms has displayed excellent performance in its description of dialogues and actions, and won admiration and appreciation aboard and at home. Since the 28th year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, a great number of foreign translators, such as ones from Japan, UK, Russia, Thailand, France, Spain and other countries, have translated it into their own languages and published many monographs and articles. At the same time, with the arrival of the 21 st century, Chinese literary classics have been held in high regard under the background of globalization. Many domestic scholars thereby gradually intensify their efforts to conduct comparative studies on Three Kingdoms and its translated version. However, most of the previous researchers concentrate on the difference of pragmatic equivalence, appellation words, poetry translation and other aspects. This thesis attempts to launch a comparative study of cohesive devices applied in Three Kingdoms and its English version from the perspective of cohesion theory, which provides readers and future researchers with a completely new viewpoint of learning and understanding this novel. In addition, the author also analyzes the frequency of occurrence of different cohesive devices, such as collocation, repetition, ellipsis, substitution, and reference, based on the examples of Three Kingdoms and Moss Romance’s translated version. Thus, three research purposes will be achieved in this thesis:1) To fill up the blank of Three Kingdoms in the field of cohesion;2) To supply more typical case studies for the research of cohesive devices;3) To provide translators with more concrete and practice-guided strategies on the basis of the comparative results.Since the 1990s, many scholars have applied the research achievements of text linguistics to translation practice. The main reasons of this phenomenon lie in the fact that both text linguistics and translatology tend to understand context in terms of discourse, which is beyond simple word or sentence level. As the core content of text linguistics, cohesion theory gains special attention and emphasis of both foreign and domestic translators. It’s an indispensable ability for a qualified translator to understand and master the knowledge of cohesive devices. Translators are able to comprehend the cohesion and coherence of the source text recurring to a good knowledge of cohesive devices. Thus, they will produce more natural and native translated text and help target readers to react in almost the same way with source readers. Although lots of previous studies have been made in the perspective of cohesive devices, many of them summarize a macro and generalized translation strategy at the end of their articles. This strategy may be viewed as unspecified or less convincible. Under the circumstances, the author is inspired from the previous study limitations and presents an entirely new writing pattern:theory-example-analysis-strategy. This means that translation strategies will be correspondingly suggested after exemplifying and analyzing the difference of each kind of cohesive device applied in Three Kingdoms and its English version. This new writing pattern is equipped with the advantage of assisting readers to understand abstract theories with the aid of concrete case studies. Moreover, readers can fully master and flexibly make use of some relevant translation strategies.M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan are honored as "the founders of cohesion theory". In the Cohesion in English, they stated that "The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text." (Halliday & Hassan,1976:31) Based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory and plenty of case studies, this thesis aims at producing a comparative analysis of cohesive devices applied in Three Kingdoms and its English version from the following two aspects:the grammatical cohesion and the lexical cohesion. The former consists of reference, substitution and ellipsis, while the latter is made up of reiteration and collocation. It is worth mentioning that this thesis probes into two new angles of analyzing the lexical cohesion, one of which is antonym and the other is lexical chain. And many examples have been drawn from Three Kingdoms and its English version for the purpose of manifesting the study findings. With the help of quantitative analysis, this thesis finds that lexical chains are used with the highest frequency in the source text, while the target text tends to employ more referents to express its cohesion. At the same time, this thesis tentatively suggests the main reasons that caused this difference. Chinese gives special attentions to parataxis and more lexical chains will be employed in Chinese text to achieve semantic integrity and textual coherence. On the contrary, English is a hypotactic language and prefers to rely on reference and other devices to realize equivalent pragmatic effect. Six chapters will be presented in this thesis. Chapter one is introduction, which presents readers with study backgrounds and methods, as well as thesis structures. Literary review is stated in Chapter two, which gives a concrete explanation of some important terms and summarizes many international and domestic studies on cohesive devices. Theoretical framework is introduced in the third Chapter, which chooses cohesion theory and comparative linguistic theory as the foundation of this thesis. Chapter four and chapter five are the main bodies of this thesis. By means of exemplifying various cohesive devices applied in Three Kingdoms and its English version, similarities and differences will be found and summarized. Besides, some specific and practice-guided translation strategies will be introduced according to the usage context and frequency of each kind of cohesive devices. For example, Chinese language tends to highlight the new information by light of lexical repetition, while English usually tries to avoid this way. This implies that translators should make appropriate adjustment to the cohesive devices used in the source text and the target text, like replacing the lexical repetition with the reference or substitution. The last chapter makes a generalized conclusion about this thesis.On the basis of a comparative analysis of cohesive devices between English and Chinese text, some obvious differences are demonstrated in this thesis. For example, in order to avoid unnecessary redundancy and realize a concise expression, Chinese language usually omits some subjects that have been presupposed in previous text, while English language tends to preserve those subjects in order to ensure a complete sentence structure. Therefore, Chinese text will employ more ellipses than English. Besides, another difference may be reflected by the use of collocation. As a paratactic language, Chinese often creates coherent and complete sentence by employing a great deal of collocation, which is an important form of lexical cohesion. Collocation appears more frequently in Chinese than in English, even two times higher than that of English in some cases. Inspired from the above findings, translators often flexibly make use of collocation in different contexts. For example, in the process of C-E translation, when collocation is used in source text, target text tends to employ reference, substitution or synonym to achieve the same cohesion effect.