| Compared with the analysis of news as discourse,translated news have received less attention,and many studies of news translation focusing on translation strategies are summaries and descriptions of translators’ subjective experiences based on examples or case analysis.There is a lack of exploration into the textual cohesion of translational English news,especially in comparison with English native speakers.Therefore,within the framework of Halliday’s cohesion theories,this study conducts an empirical and exploratory investigation of cohesive features in the first drafts of EFL students’translations of publicity-oriented news through a comparative analysis with the final versions reviewed by English-native-speaker foreign experts,based on 100 pieces of news texts respectively.To explore valuable lessons about cohesion shift as a translation strategy from English-native-speaker foreign experts in publicity-oriented news translation,the study also conducts a comparative analysis of cohesion between the translational English revisions by foreign experts and the original Chinese texts.Using the corpus linguistic tool Coh-Metrix 3.0,and the manual annotation tool BFSU Qualitative Coder,this study aims to answer the following two questions:(1)Are the cohesive features in the first drafts of EFL students’ news translations different from those in the final versions reviewed by foreign experts?If there is any variation,what are the reasons?(2)Is there any cohesion shift in news translation for international dissemination compared to the original Chinese?What factors can that be attributed to?At the end of the study,a teaching material design is presented to provide practical guidance for EFL classroom teaching of textual cohesion based on corpus linguistic methods.The results demonstrate that the cohesive features in the first drafts of EFL students’news translations are different from those in the final versions reviewed by foreign experts,such that EFL students tend to use more grammatical devices of "it" and "the" in publicity-oriented news translations than English native speakers with statistically significant differences.However,English native speakers usually change the "it" in EFL learners’ translations by clarifying what it specifically denotes through the transformation of the construction,and delete "the" when structurally redundant or semantically insufficient,or for the transformation of sentential structures.Compared to the original Chinese news texts,translational English news as a distinct text type,features an explicitation of grammatical cohesion and reduced repetition of lexical cohesion,with statistically significant differences.First,in terms of grammatical cohesion,personal and demonstrative pronouns,as well as conjunction devices for extension and enhancement,which usually take the form of conjunctive adjuncts and help clarify related temporal,situational,and contextual information typical to news texts,are frequently used in translational English news.Second,as for lexical cohesion,though repetition is used in a most frequent way among all kinds of lexical cohesion items in both the English translated texts and the original Chinese texts,verbatim repletion can be avoided or reduced,based on the stylistic features of news texts.For example,make a word change based on lexical relations including synonymy,hyponymy,meronomy and collocation,transform contextual information into modifier expressions,and add background information for geographical location names and technical expressions.The theoretical explanation in terms of language typology is employed to account for the cohesion shift as a translation strategy in publicity-oriented news translation.Different cohesion relations of explicitness in a hypotactic language and implicitness in a paratactic language,and different grammatical constructions of subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages,present cohesion shifts in news translation.Based on the above comparative analysis of cohesion between the first drafts of EFL students’ news translations and the final versions reviewed by native-English-speaker foreign experts,as well as the original Chinese news texts,it can be inferred that both the stylistic features of publicity-oriented news text and the systemic distinctions of English and Chinese should be taken into consideration in dealing with the use of cohesion devices in translation.On the one hand,publicity-oriented news features a communicative effect in which the message is rendered as expressively as possible.On the other hand,the systemic characteristics of the source language Chinese(paratactic and topic-prominent)and the target language English(hypotactic and subject-prominent)usually result in a transformation of syntactic structure in C-E translation.influencing the usage patterns of cohesive devices.Therefore,EFL learners should make appropriate choices for cohesive items so that publicity-oriented news can be rendered expressively and idiomatically. |
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