On The Feasibility Of Text As Translational Unit

Translational unit (UT) has long been a controversial issue in the field of translation theory and practice. Many translation theorists in and out of China have been studying this issue from their own perspectives for many years. Which level of the language unit should be taken as UT is still under discussion. This thesis adopts the cohesion theory and analyzes many examples from the perspective of reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, reiteration and collocation, trying to prove the feasibility of taking text as UT.This thesis employs the theories of scholars aboard and at home, especially the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hason. Since they published Cohesion in English and established the cohesion theory which has been a hot issue, many theorists have been devoting to the study of the theory. Cohesion is a critical factor in forming a text, playing an important role in the text translation. The translator's awareness of the cohesive devices in the source text has a great impact on the understanding of the meaning of the source text and the quality of the target text.With the development of the text analyses and text translation, the range that the cohesion theory covers is becoming wider and wider. More and more scholars are studying the relationship between cohesion and translation. Text linguistics is adopted in the translation research more and more frequently, thus text is considered as UT other than sentence. In the process of translation, the translator should view the text as a whole. In order to have a perfect translation product, it is necessary for the translators to comprehend the cohesive devices in source text and render them into target text which conforms to the conventions of the target language.