A Contrastive Study On The Cohesive Devices Translation In Two English Versions Of Luotuo Xiangzi From Perspective Of Hallidayan Textualinguistics

The appearance of text linguistics in the 20th century expands the research on language to the textual level.The publication of Cohesion in English co-authored by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 marked the establishment of the cohesion theory,in which Halliday and Hasan summarized five cohesive devices,namely the grammatical devices which include reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction,and the lexical devices.Later,some scholars have revised and expanded the cohesion theory which makes it play an increasingly important role in translation study.Each language has its special features;as a result,translators can't ignore the importance of textual cohesion in the process of translation.Research on translation from the perspective of text linguistics makes it possible to deal with the reoccurrence of information on a higher level of language structure.Cohesion,as one of the seven criteria of textuality,is the basis to comprehend a text and cohesive device is a semantic relation,distinguishing a text from a non-text.According to Hallidayan cohesion theory,the present study has collected some data from the two English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi(Shi Xiaojing's version and Evan King's version),and tried to explore which cohesive devices are adopted in this novel as well as how do two translators cope with these cohesive devices.To make the translations smooth and coherent,translators have to consider different cohesive devices adopted in the source text and in the target text.According to the analyses of examples selected in the texts,it can be seen that in the novel Luotuo Xiangzi,all five cohesive devices can be found,namely,reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction,and the lexical devices.Besides,basically the two translators have chosen four translation techniques such as preservation,transformation,omission and addition.In translating cohesive devices,both translators mainly use preservation,namely,rendering the cohesive devices in the source text into their English equivalents.Examples can be found in translation of lexical cohesion and collocation.However,while translating other cohesive devices such as ellipsis,compared with Shi Xiaojing,Evan King relatively prefers transformation and addition.After the analyses of cohesive devices in Luotuo Xiangzi and translation techniques employed by the two translators,the present study has made some explanations to investigate the similarities and differences between two translators in the application of these translation methods.To begin with,from the perspective of translators' preferences,both Ms Shi and Evan King like to preserve the original cohesive devices because they emphasize the faithfulness to the source text.Compared with Ms Shi,Evan favors transformation or addition because he pays attention to creativity and acceptability of the target readers.Furthermore,as English language is hypotactic,English grammar and structure are very important for the understanding of a text while Chinese language is paratactic which attaches more importance to semantic meanings,then to ensure the completion of cohesive devices,sometimes translators have to add or omit some devices in C-E translation.Besides,different thinking patterns lead to different choices.The subjective thinking patterns of Chinese people and objective and logical thinking patterns of English people exert great influence on the differences of cohesive devices and translation methods.