A Corpus-Based Study of Cohesion in English Medical Texts and its Chinese Translation

Cohesion as an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis and translation has aroused many researchers’ interest. To explore the regularity in shifting cohesive devices from English into Chinese our study was designed to analyze the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between English medical texts (EMTs) and their Chinese translation texts (CTTs). A parallel corpus consisting of 15 EMTs and 15 CTTs was established, each type of cohesive devices was identified, and paired t-test was run for statistic analysis. We have revealed that both EMTs and CTTS share more similarities than differences in the use of cohesive devices; the differences between them only exist in the employment of reference in terms of occurrence frequencies; the majority of cohesive devices are maintained in Chinese translation for precision, clarity and logicality. Our study will not only help medical students and medical workers but also shed light on EMP teaching and research.