The Reproduction Of Cohesion And Coherence In Text Translation

Since the 1990s, many Western and Chinese translation theorists have been applying text linguistics to translation studies because those two branches have a lot in common: The objects of their studies are both living languages in culture-loaded communication; the description of the context above the sentence level is attached great importance to in both fields. This thesis attempts to study translation at the level of text by looking at cohesion and coherence, two important notions in text linguistics.By conducting contrastive studies between English and Chinese in terms of cohesion and coherence, this thesis attempts to throw a new light on text translation between English and Chinese. In such contrastive studies pragmatics, cultural comparison and some other linguistic concepts including subject prominence, topic-prominence and thematic progression are employed. Through those studies the thesis intends to illustrate that cohesion and coherence are two essential features in a text which must be reproduced in text translation. In the reproduction of them the translator may not necessarily draw upon the original cohesion pattern or coherence pattern. In many cases he must make necessary modifications in order to produce a cohesion pattern or a coherence pattern functionally correspondent to the original one. Such modifications are necessitated by the contrasts between English and Chinese in cohesion and coherence, which reflect the contrasts in cultural background or cognitive pattern.The thesis consists of five chapters besides introduction and conclusion.Introduction briefly introduces the necessity or the significance of the researches that result in this thesis.Chapter One discusses the notion of text, which naturally leads to the introduction of the two terms of cohesion and coherence because they are essential to the unity of a text. After their definitions are given, the thesis theorizes on the conditions on which coherence is achieved.Chapter Two presents contrastive studies between Chinese and English in cohesion and coherence from an intercultural perspective.Chapter Three probes into the representation of cohesion in text translation with the findings introduced in the previous chapter as a theoretical basis. Then it proceeds to discuss the role that stylistic considerations play in the translator's choice of the method of cohesion reproduction.Chapter Four focuses on the reproduction of coherence. It also explores the contrast between the Chinese and the English as two nations in terms of cultural background and cognitive structure that may make the modifications of the original coherence pattern necessary.Chapter Five is devoted to the relationship between the reproduction of cohesion and the reproduction of coherence.Conclusion sums up the previous chapters and points out that the reproduction of cohesion and the reproduction of coherence are worthy and necessary goals and that the researches into them a promising field.