A Comparative Study Between The Essays By Francis Bacon And Its Chinese Versions From Cohesive Perspective

It is well known that traditional translation justifies translation quality by “the loyalty to the source language”. However, what we called “loyalty” always seeks word for word translation; it is likely to ignore the coherence and cohesion of the whole text. Thus, the target language will be improper in cohesion and lose the original features of the source language. Text-linguistics has developed constantly since 20 th century and people began to pay attention to the close connections between text and translation practice. And cohesion theory has also been paid great attention by western and Chinese linguists since it has been put forward. It is of great significance on the development of text analysis, stylistics and translation. Many translation scholars have applied text linguistics into translation area since 1990 s. This mainly depends on the common features between text linguistics and translation which both needs to be studied from textual level.Halliday and Hason have published a book Cohesion in English which marked the establishment of cohesion theory and this book has made detailed explanations on the classifications and different devices of cohesion. With the development and improvement of cohesion theory, many scholars have applied cohesion theory into translation practice. Based on the previous researches on cohesion, this thesis adopts comparative analysis and case study as research methods and Bacon’s Essays and its Chinese versions as research objects. Three questions are to be solved in this thesis: 1. What are the differences between Bacon’s essays and its Chinese versions from cohesive device perspective? 2. In translation practice, what general patterns can we get from the comparative analysis between Bacon’s Essays and its Chinese versions? 3. What are the characteristics between Cao Minglun and Shui Tiantong’s translations?This thesis has got three main findings: 1. there are not only similarities but differences between English cohesion and Chinese cohesion and differences are more than similarities. 2. Some general patterns will be showed according to the analysis of Bacon’s Essays: as personal references in English text are more than in Chinese text, so we can reduce personal references of English text in E-C translation; as Chinese has no such definite article like “the”, so we can use reduction when demonstrative reference appears in English text; while according to the analysis of comparative reference, we can see English also changes the form of adjectives and adverbs to achieve comparison, but there is no morphology changes in Chinese adjectives and adverbs, so we can change the forms of the same words to achieve the cohesive effect; English substitution and ellipsis are also used more frequently than Chinese, so we can repeat the appeared or omitted words of English in E-C translation; for the lexical conjunction, we can use a general word to replace the synonym, antonym, hyponym, reciprocal words in Chinese and make adjustments according to Chinese conventions. 3. There are also many characteristics including similarities between Cao Minglun and Shui Tiantong’s handling techniques in translations: use repetition or the same sentence structure to make cohesion; using “ 的 ” structure or reiteration; Complementing the omitted parts; employing the same word to refer to the words throughout the context.There are six chapters in this thesis. Chapter 1 is the introduction covers the background, significance, research questions, methodology and organization of this thesis. Chapter 2 is literature review that includes the research status at home and abroad. Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework that shows Halliday and Hason’s cohesion theory and the development of cohesion theory. Chapter 4 and 5 are the main parts of this thesis. These two chapters give the introduction of Bacon’s Essays and specific examples in Bacon’s Essays and its Chinese versions from different cohesive devices will be analyzed. It aims to explore the differences between English cohesion and Chinese cohesion as well as the handling techniques in Cao Minglun and Shui Tiantong’s translations. Chapter 6 is conclusion that involves major findings, limitations and further research suggestions.