Discourse reconstruction in the English translation of Sunzi’s The Art of War: a grammatical cohesion perspective

This study investigates discourse reconstruction in translating Sunzi’s The Art of War from classical Chinese into English, focusing on how translators adapt grammatical cohesion devices to enhance readability and contribute to discourse reconstruction in the target text. The study employs a mixed-method approach, combining corpus analysis (via AntConc 3.5.7) with manual linguistic examination to analyze a dataset comprising the original text and its two translations, comparing the original with translations by Lin Wusun and Lionel Giles to examine shifts in reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Findings reveal that both translations rely more on reference and conjunction devices, while substitution and ellipsis are more frequent in the original. These shifts reflect translators’ strategies to clarify relationships and provide context for English readers, balancing fidelity to the source text with readability. This study contributes to discourse reconstruction by examining grammatical cohesion in classical Chinese-English translation, offering insights into how meaning is reorganized across languages and proposing a framework for further investigation into cross-cultural discourse reconstruction.

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