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Cohesion in Chinese-English Literature Translation

Author: FuYiZuo
Tutor: FuYongLin
School: Southwest Jiaotong University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Cohesion Devices Text Chinese-English Translation
CLC: I046
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 240
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Abstract

Cohesion has been of great concern in the linguistic and the translation circle since the establishment of cohesion theory in the 1970s marked by the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English. Many linguists and scholars have been studying them and have tried to establish the relation between them and their importance in the creation of a text. Cohesion, seen as a necessary condition in text production, thus holds an important position in text translation. Translators’ awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between the languages are crucial since they do not only affect translators’ understanding of the source text but also influence the quality of the target text.With the development of discourse analysis and text translation studies, the coverage of cohesion has gradually expanded, and researchers are investigating the roles that cohesion plays in various fields, such as reading, writing, text type, stylistics and translation. Many are also conducting contrastive studies on English and Chinese cohesive devices and analyzing their significance in translation. But how to operate the cohesive devices in the translating process is still in need of systematic discussion, and how the cohesive differences between the two languages affect translation strategies in the translation practice should be further combed and perfected. Since each language has developed its particular devices that are by no means the totally same as those of other languages, the translator should create cohesion in the target text using the cohesive devices acceptable to receptors in order to attain a natural target text. To achieve this, the translator should have a keen awareness of the contrastive results in cohesive devices between the source and the target languages and their influence on translation. Where discrepancies exist, adjustments and shifts in cohesive devices are necessary for producing a natural target text, which form one of the major sources of difficulties occurring in translation. Therefore, based on Halliday and Hasan’ cohesion theory, taking Shen Congwen’s masterpiece Bian Cheng and Gladys Yang’s translation version as the experimental case, this thesis attempts to describe the differences on cohesion between Chinese and English, to analyze the factors which bring about those dissimilarities, and systematically discusses the corresponding shifts and adjustments necessarily involved in C-E translation in order to achieve a highest degree of naturalness in translation.The methodology adopted in this paper stresses the contrastive study and the analysis of data and examples. The development of the thesis is as follows: this thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 makes a brief review of the origin and development of cohesion theory made by Halliday and some other scholars at home and abroad. The concept of cohesion, its classification, its relation to coherence, and its relation to text translation are also introduced. In this chapter, it states out the purpose, significance, method and layout of the study. Chapter 2 analyzes the differences in thinking modality, sentence and thematic structures between Chinese and English. The author holds that such differences between the two languages as parataxis vs. hypotaxis, topic-prominent vs. subject-prominent, and bamboo-type sentence structure vs. tree-type, are the roots of the differences in cohesive devices. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 is the pivot of this study. Taken Bian Cheng and it is English translation as the case to study, through the analysis of data and the demonstration of abundant examples, these two chapters respectively make a description and contrast of the cohesive devices in Chinese and English, that is, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration and collocation, and attempt to find out the differences as well as similarities between the Chinese and English cohesive devices and some of the rules in the translation of cohesive devices. Chapter 5 draws a conclusion based on the former discussion and points out the limitations of the study.

Cohesion in Chinese-English Literature Translation

Abstract

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