| With the burgeoning of text linguistics,many translation theorists came to realize that the basic unit of translation should be elevated from sentence to the higher level of text,since this can help address many problems associated with sentence-oriented translation methods.Consequently,the text-based translation approach has been formulated.Cohesion and coherence,as two most important standards for textuality put forward by De Beaugrande and Dresslor,have caught the wide attention of world-famous translation theorists and translators.Within the theoretical framework of Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesion,this thesis chooses as research subjects Vanity Fair and its Chinese version by Yang Bi to compare cohesive devices in English and Chinese for the ultimate purpose of systematically summarizing translation techniques.The thesis mainly adopts comparative analysis method.The author first selected examples from other sources so as to explore the similarities and differences in conjunction,substitution and ellipsis between English and Chinese,and to further investigate the impacts they might exert upon E-C translation.Then,the author selected example sentences with the afore-mentioned cohesive devices from Vanity Fair,and compared them with Yang Bi’s translations,so as to systematically summarize translation techniques used to render them.In the end,example sentences from other chapters were collected and compared so that the validity of the translation techniques summarized are established.Results suggest that conjunction,substitution,and ellipsis in both languages resemble in cohesive function and classification.However,the differences in lexical and grammatical functions between two languages and the frequencies with which they use such devices indicate that in most cases,translators should modify the original cohesive devices.Through comparing the two versions of Vanity Fair,the author found that except addition that can be used exclusively to render ellipsis,the translation of the three afore-mentioned cohesive devices all involves the use of preservation,omission,and conversion.It is also observed that the cohesive relation signaled through a certain cohesive device in the source text is always maintained in the target text,either explicitly or implicitly,regardless of the technique utilized to render it. |
