Shifts of Cohesive Devices in English-Chinese Translation

This paper explores shifts of cohesive devices in translating English texts into Chinese based on the framework of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, regarding the different preferences for cohesive devices in the two languages and strategies adopted in the shifting process. In the meanwhile, the underlying causes contributing to the differences in cohesion are explored from the perspective of the two distinct language differences, namely topic-prominence and subject prominence; parataxis and hypotaxis. Several English texts and their corresponding ones in Chinese are analyzed to achieve these goals.