Grammatical Cohesion In Jane Eyre And Its Chinese Translation By Huang Yuanshen: A Comparative Study

The translation of Charlotte Bront?’s great work Jane Eyre into Chinese constitutes an outstanding instance of English-Chinese literary translation.Among the different translations of Jane Eyre,the Chinese translation of Jane Eyre by Huang Yuanshen,i.e.Jian Ai,figures prominently.Naturally,there have been many studies of the Chinese translations of Jane Eyre including Huang’s version,with some studies conducted from non-linguistic perspectives and others from some linguistic perspectives.Though existing studies have made remarkable achievements,studies so far are limited by their data,theoretical perspectives,methods and findings.In particular,there are few comparative studies of Jane Eyre and its Chinese translations from text-linguistic viewpoints which focus on their use of grammatical cohesive devices.Guided by relevant views in comparative linguistics,comparative culturology and translation studies,based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan,using correspondent fragments from Charlotte Bront?’s Jane Eyre and its Chinese translation by Huang Yuanshen as data,and through the methodology of theory-based case study integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis,this study attempts to make a comparative study of the English and Chinese texts of Jane Eyre in terms of their use of such grammatical cohesive devices as reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction so as to describe and explain the similarities and differences between the two texts in the types of cohesive devices used and in the frequency of using them.Results generated from the study have come to reveal:(1)In general,the English and Chinese texts are the same in the types of grammatical cohesion used;they are however different in the frequency of using grammatical cohesive devices,with the former using more and thus appearing to hypotactic and the latter using fewer and therefore being paratactic.(2)In particular,the English and Chinese texts are different in the frequency of using the four types of grammatical cohesion.Firstly,the former mainly uses personal reference,but the latter often uses zero anaphora;the former prefers remote demonstrative reference,but the latter likes near ones;the former often uses comparative forms for comparative reference,but the latter mainly uses lexical devices.Secondly,although neither the English nor the Chinese text uses substitution and ellipsis often,the former uses substitution more often and the latter uses ellipsis more frequently.Thirdly,the English and Chinese texts are slightly different in using conjunction,with the former using explicit conjuncts but the latter implicit ones.(3)The differences between the English and Chinese texts in using grammatical cohesive devices,with the former being hypotactic and the latter paratactic,may have been caused by their respective cultural contexts,with the former embedded in a context of Western analytic,objective and logical thinking but the latter conditioned by a context of Chinese holistic,subjective,and intuitive thinking.This study may hopefully be significant to both the practice and theory of translation.In terms of practice,its findings may enhance the literary translators’ awareness about the similarities and differences between English and Chinese texts in using cohesive devices.In terms of academic research,this study may contribute to the study of literary translation in particular and translation studies in general in the exploration of the differences between English and Chinese texts in the aspect of grammatical cohesion.