A Contrastive Study Of Textual Coherence Between Chinese And English In The True Story Of AH-Q

Modern Chinese writer Lu Xun’s novel The True Story of AH Q enjoys great popularity both at home and abroad.It has not only become a must-read in China,but also has been translated into 171 different versions in 15 languages worldwide.Among them,the number of Japanese versions and English versions are the most,with55 versions and 45 versions respectively.Chinese and foreign celebrities,such as the famous Chinese writer Zheng Zhenduo and the French critical realist writer Romain Rolland,all gave high praise to the True Story of AH Q.The English version of the True Story of AH Q is a successful work of translating Chinese literary works into English.This paper selects the English version of the True Story of AH Q and the Chinese text as the corpus basis for the coherent contrastive study of Chinese and English texts.The current research on the English version of the True Story of AH Q mainly focuses on translation,and there is no contrastive study of Chinese and English texts,let alone the coherence of the translation.Based on Halliday’s theory of systemic-functional linguistics and domestic linguist’s theory of cohesion and coherence,this paper explores the micro and macro differences in the coherence between Chinese and English in the True Story of AH Q and applies the founding of this research to the translation and teaching of Chinese and English texts.The first chapter sorts out the micro differences of Chinese and English discourse coherence.Based on previous studies on discourse cohesion,this chapter focuses on the differences of Chinese and English discourse cohesion from the aspects of phonology,vocabulary and grammar,and syntactic structure,and presents the significant differences in the form of difference pairs.The author finds that Chinese discourse attaches great importance to phonetic repetition and tonal structure to form coherence.English texts tend to avoid phonetic repetition and use lexical devices,such as anaphora,to construct contextual coherence.In terms of lexical cohesion,Chinese discourse uses conjunctions less frequently than English discourse,and Chinese discourse uses punctuation to establish psychological coherence.In terms of temporal and spatial coherence,Chinese discourse adopts narrative chronological order,while English discourse uses grammatical means such as tense and voice.At the side of sentence structure,Chinese sentences have left-branch structure and Chinese sentences use right-branch structure.In contrast,Chinese sentence extension ability is limited,and English sentence extension ability is stronger than Chinese sentence,so Chinese sentences are concise and English sentences are complicated.In a word,Chinese discourse takes semantic coherence as its main body and psychological cognitive mechanism as its foundation.Formal coherence is the core of English discourse and grammatical morphology is the criterion.The second chapter mainly studies the differences of textual coherence between Chinese and English from a macroscopic perspective.The macro context of a text is the condition of coherence.Previous studies have divided the study of macro context into inner context and outer context.Inner context has less influence on written Chinese and English texts that aim to express the same meaning,so this paper mainly studies the influence of different levels of Cultural context in Chinese and English on discourse coherence.This paper adopts the cultural classification method,which divides the cultural context into three aspects: social context,material context and conceptual context.From the above three aspects,this paper compares the differences of cultural context coherence between Chinese and English in the True Story of AH Q.This paper finds that in order to achieve coherence within and between texts,Chinese and English texts adopt the methods of context borrowing,context transplantation,context fusion and context creation to achieve reconstruction of cultural contexts.Chapter three explores the implications of English-Chinese discourse coherence in translation practice and teaching.Translation is an important means to promote the cultural development of China and enhance the cultural influence of China.The micro-coherence of Chinese and English texts shows that English texts mainly rely on formal coherence,while Chinese texts mainly rely on semantic coherence,and the dynamic balance of "form" and "meaning" should be achieved in the process of translation between Chinese and English texts.Secondly,in order to achieve the macro coherence of Chinese and English texts,new media resources can be used to build a tie of cultural interaction between Chinese and English,and create more common foundations for the Cultural context of Chinese and English.The common basis of cultural context can make the translation of cultural context easier.The study of discourse coherence also contributes to the development of foreign language teaching.Teachers guide students to improve their understanding of the coherence of vocabulary,grammar and sentence patterns and Chinese texts,and strengthen the learning of English culture from the macro aspect,and finally improve their reading comprehension ability.In terms of writing,teachers can guide students to understand the coherence differences between Chinese and English texts,understand the structural and cultural differences between Chinese and English texts from the macro aspect,and understand the cohesive devices of Chinese and English texts from the micro aspect,which can be applied in practical writing.In short,based on the True Story of AhQ and the Chinese and English texts,this paper studies the differences in coherence between Chinese and English texts from the micro and macro aspects and interdisciplinary research methods,and applies the research results to translation and teaching of reading and writing.