The Differences between English and Chinese Discourse and Their Effect on Translation.doc

英汉语篇差异对汉英翻译的影响基于英语专业四年级学生翻译语料的分析The Differences between English and Chinese Discourse and Their Effect on Translation-Based on the Data of Translation of the Seniors of English Majors 摘 要本文比较了英汉语篇的差异并基于英语专业四年级学生的翻译语料，从人称照应，指示照应，比较照应，名词替代，动词替代和从句替代等层面说明语篇理论的确能指导翻译实践并能提高翻译的质量。关键词： 语篇理论；汉英语篇差异；照应；替代AbstractThis thesis compares the difference between English and Chinese discourse. Based on the translation data of the seniors of English majors, the thesis explains the effect of the discourse difference on translating reference and substitution from Mandarin Chinese into English. Reference includes personal reference, demonstrative reference, comparison reference. Substitution includes nominal substitution, verbal substitution and clausal substitution. It indicates that discourse theory can indeed guide the learners translation and improve the quality of translation.Keywords: Discourse theory; English and Chinese reference; substitutionContentsPage摘 要IAbstractIIAcknowledgementsIIIContentsIV1. Introduction11.1 Research Questions11.2 Organization12. Literature Review23. The Differences between English and Chinese Discourse34. The Effect of Discourse Differences on Translation54.1 Reference54.1.1 Personal Reference64.1.2 Demonstrative Reference74.1.3 Comparison Reference94.2 Substitution104.2.1 Nominal Substitution114.2.2 Verbal Substitution124.2.3 Clausal substitution135. Conclusion15References161.Introduction1.1 Research QuestionsThis paper aims to discuss the effect of the differences between English and Chinese discourse upon English into Chinese and Chinese into English translation, based on the translation homework of seniors of English Majors. With the publication of “Cohesion in English” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), “Discourse Analysis” (Brown & Yule, 1983), “Discourse & Literature” (Cook, 1994) and “Introduction and Analysis: Theory and Method” (Gee, 1990), discourse theory has become very popular and has been applied in many fields such as language teaching and translation. In my thesis, two questions would be addressed: 1) Are their discourse differences between English and Chinese in terms of reference and substitution? 2) How the differences affect translation? The purpose of this thesis is an attempt to find out whether discourse theory can guide learners translation and whether it can improve the quality of the translated work. 1.2 OrganizationThe organization of the paper is as following: Section 2 will give a brief literature review. Section 3 will present the differences between English discourse and Chinese discourse in terms of reference and substitution. Section 4 analyzes how the differences affect learners translation. Section 5 comes to a conclusion. 2. Literature ReviewEver since the establishment of discourse theory, many professors of translation have been discovering the relationship between discourse theory and translation. Discourse and the Translator (Hatim & Mason, 2001) is among the most important theories books of this kind. In their book, Hatim & Mason explain the translation “as an act of translation” through sociolinguistics, discourse studies, pragmatics and semiotics, and from the field of artificial intelligence and conversation analysis. The central concern of Discourse and the Translator is “translating as a communicative process which takes place within a social context. Texture function includes cohesion and coherence, theme-rheme and information structure and this book expresses them separately. On the belief that both cohesion and coherence may be said to be the standards of textuality (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981), they think both cohesion and coherence need to be standards of textuality. As for theme-rheme structure, sentence elements are seen to function within a certain perspective of communicative importance, which means that thematic elements are “context-dependent” and consequently of lesser communicative importance than “context-independent” rhematic elements. In addition to viewing theme-transition-rheme within a perspective of communicative importance, there is also information structure. The information structure of a text involves: (a) predictability and recoverability of information, (b) saliency of information, and (c) shared assumptions. The process of reading is to get new information from the given-information. There are few monologues about discourse theory and translation in China and most of the Chinese experts write about how to use discourse theory to guide translation. “Chinese into English Translation on Discourse Level” (Ju, 2000) and “English into Chinese Translation on Discourse Level” (Li, 2001) talk about how to use discourse theory in translation practice and give a lot of example to demonstrate it. There are also many professors who have published papers to study the relationship between discourse theory and translation. However, there are few studies about the discourse differences on translation in terms of reference and substitution based on the data of the learners. My study is an attempt in this area. 3. The Differences Between English and Chinese Discourse Nada has said that every language has its own feature and it is necessary to follow their features to have effective communication. As English and Chinese have different origins, they certainly have obvious differences. English is of subject-prominent typology while Chinese is of topic-comment typology (Chen & Yu, 2001). So Chinese is a language of parataxis-prominence, which emphasizes the image that the characters describe. English is of hypostasis-prominence, which has tie cohesion and reasonable logic. For example:(1) 阿Q 没有家，（他）住在本社的土谷祠里；（他）也有固定的职业，只给人家作短工，（人家叫他）割麦（他）便割麦，（人家叫他）舂米（他）便舂米，（人家叫他）撑船（他）便撑船。(2) He had flown in just the day before from Georgia where he had spent his vocation basking in Cauccsian sun after the completion of the construction job which he had been engaged on in the south.From example (1), we can see that this sentence has a lot of ellipsis and repetition, and full of headless sentences. This shows that the Mandarin Chinese if of loose sentence structures. Example (2) is a pretty long sentence with 37 words but its relationship is very clear. Its basic structure is “He had flown in just the day before from Georgia” with “where he had spent his vocation basking in Cauccsian sun after the completion of the construction job which he had been engaged on in the south” as an attributive clause to modify “Georgia”. In the attributive clause, “after the completion of the construction job which he had been engaged on in the south” serves as an adverbial clause of time, in which “which he had been engaged on in the south” is an attributive clause to modify “the construction job”. Although the sentence is pretty long, with the help of conjunctive words, it is clearly structured.Niu Baoyi (1999) studied 638 English sentences and 696 Chinese sentences and found out that there are 4252 times of cohesion in English, of which there were 2352 times of reference, taking up 55% of the total, 97 times of ellipsis, 2% of the total and 28 times of substitution, taking up 0.6% of the total; and there were 2154 times of cohesion in Chinese, of which there were 737 times of reference, taking up 34% of the total, 357 times of ellipsis, taking up 16% of the total and 14 times of substitution, taking up 0.6% of the total. According to this statistics, Chinese text has less cohesive words than English text. Considering the differences between English text and Chinese text, it is necessary to choose appropriate ways to translation.4. The Effect of Discourse Differences on Translation Discourse, also called text, is a coherent and cohesive unit, realized by one or more than one sequence of mutually relevant elements, and serving some overall rhetorical purpose. Texture function includes cohesion and coherence as the procedures which ensure conceptual connectivity, including ( 1) logical relations, (2) organization of events, objects and situations, and (3) continuity in human experience. It seems safe to assume that the sequence of coherence relations would, under normal circumstances, remain constant in translation from source language to target langguage. Such basic relations as cause-effect, problem-solution, temporal sequence, and so on, are universally fundamental to meaning and the way it is structured is reflected on the surface of text the cohesion, or sequential connectivity of the surface elementsare much more likely to be language-specific or text-specific. There are many possible cohesive devices capable of relying, say, a given relationship between propositions. And in a given language, some are likely to be preferred options. Both cohesion and coherence, then, may be said to be standards of textuality (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981); both need to be maintained if communication is to be successful. According to Halliday and Hasan (1971), there are five types of cohesion in English, namely, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, among which reference and substitution are the main ways to achieve cohesion both in Chinese and English. In this paper, we will mainly discuss reference and substitutio4.1 Reference Reference is a semantic relation. Reference is a direct indication that information is to be retrieved from elsewhere and they are important types of cohesion. What characterizes reference is the specific nature of the information that is signaled for retrieval. In the case of reference the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning, the identity of the particular thing or class of things that is being referred to; and the cohesion lies in the continuity of reference, whereby the same thing enters into the discourse a second time. There are three types of reference: personal, demonstrative and comparative. Reference can also be divided into exophora or exophoric reference, i.e., situational reference and endophora, i.e., textual reference. And in endophora, we have anaphora to refer to preceding text and cataphora to refer to following text. According to Halliday & Hason (1976), only endophoric reference is cohesive because exophoric reference contributes to the creation of text, in that it links the language with the context of situation; but it does not contribute to the integration of one passage with another so that the two together form part of the same text. 4.1.1 Personal ReferencePersonal reference is reference by means of function in the speech situation, through the category of person. The category of personals includes the three classes of personal pronouns, possessive determiners and possessive pronouns. (3) If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-work and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Version 1：如果我们读书时能抛弃我们的这些成见，那将是一个可贵的开端。对你的作者不要指手画脚，而应该努力站在作者的立场上，设想自己与作者共同创作。假如你退缩不前，有所保留，并且一开始就批评指责，你就在妨碍你自己从你所读的书中得到最大的益处。然而，如果你能尽量敞开思想，那么，书中开头几句迂回曲折的话里所包含的几乎难以觉察的细微的迹象和暗示，就会把你引到一个与众不同的人物面前去。Version 2：如果我们在读书时能摒弃这些成见，那就会是阅读的良好起点。不要对作者发号施令，而应该试着去设身处地替他设想，与他合作，同他共谋。如果你一开始便却步矜持，有所保留，动辄挑剔，那么书中可能蕴含的精义，便无法充分领略了。而如果敞开心胸，虚怀若谷，透过开篇迂回曲折的字里行间，领略到那细腻微妙、几乎难以觉察到的迹象与暗示，那一与众不同的人便展现在我们面前了。 (4) 得病以前，我受父母宠爱，在家中横行霸道，一旦隔离，拘禁在花园山坡上一幢小房子里，我顿感打入冷宫，十分郁郁不得志起来。一个春天的晚上，园中百花怒放，父母在园中设宴，一时宾客云集，笑语四溢。我在山坡的小屋里，悄悄掀起窗帘，窥见园中大千世界，一片繁华，自己的哥姐，堂表兄弟，也穿插其间，个个喜气洋洋。一霎时，一阵被人摒弃，为世界所遗的悲愤兜上心头，禁不住痛哭起来。Version 1: before I fell ill, I had been spoiled by father and mother and playing the bully in the family. Once I was isolated in a small house on the slop of the garden, I felt disfavored and depressed immediately. One spring evening when hundreds of flowers were blooming in profusion, father and mother held a garden party in honor of many guests, whose arrival at once filled the place with laughing chats. In the small house on the slope, I quietly lifted the curtain, only to be met by a great and prosperous world with brothers and sisters and cousins among the guests, all in jubilation. All at once, seized by a sense of being forgotten, I could not help bursting into tears.Version 2: Before I was ill, I had been a spoiled child of my parents, getting things my way in the family. Once isolated and confined to a small house on the slope of the garden, I suddenly found myself in disfavor ad felt a bitterness of depression and frustration. One spring evening, my parents gave a banquet in the garden where a profusion of flowers were in full bloom. In no time, crowd of their guests collected and daughter was heard all over there. In the small house on the slope, I quietly lifted the curtain, only to find the bustle of a kaleidoscopic world down in the garden, and my elder brothers and sisters and my cousins were shutting among the guests, each full of joy. All at once, seized by a fit of forlorn rage, I could not help bursting into tears. Comment: The source language of example (3) uses “him” and “his” to refer to “the author” and uses “your”, “yourself” and “you” to refer to the reader, which shows the cohesion of English. However, Chinese is a concise language and we do not use so many personal reference. Version 1 translates all this words word for word, for example, “我们的这些成见”, “你的作者” and “妨碍你自己从你所读的书中”, which is not the traditional way of Chinese. Version 2 ellipses some personal references according to the Chinese. The source language of example 4 is very loose. Except for ellipsing a lot personal references, it also has sentences without subject, for example, the last sentence. However, Chinese reader can understand all these sentences. In English discourse, the personal pronouns, possessive determiners and possessive pronouns can not be ellipsed. So, when doing Chinese into English translation, the translator should represent these elements which may be implied in Chinese. Version 1 follows the structure of Chinese and ellipses some possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, for example, (my) father and mother, (my) brothers, (my) sisters, and (my) cousins, which is not suitable for English. Version 2 notices this differences and does a good job in translation.From the above examples we can conclude that both Chinese and English have personal references, but the frequency of references used in English is more than that in Chinese. So, when doing C-E translation, we should dig o