Cohesion In English-Chinese Translation Of International Treaties

Cohesion is an important means to ensure that a text is a "whole" piece of information, so the translation of cohesion is equally important as to the purpose of making the translation into a "whole" piece of information as well. Different types of texts have different features in cohesion, and thus there are different ways to cope with cohesion in translation. This paper focuses on the cohesion in English-Chinese translation of international treaties.There are five types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Two of them, namely substitution and ellipsis, do not appear a lot in international treaties, for their usage may increase the risk of misunderstanding. Reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion are widely used in international treaties.Translation of cohesion in international treaties is comparatively more difficult in reference, substitution and ellipsis. These three are grammatical cohesion, whose translation is greatly influenced by the different grammatical systems of English and Chinese. Since there are few instances of substitution and ellipsis in international treaties, the translation of reference is conspicuously important. The translation of conjunction is comparatively easy in that the logico-semantic relations in the original and the translation should be basically the same, and most conjunction items have Chinese equivalents. The way to tackle lexical cohesion is also to maintain the consistency of wording in the original, and fortunately on most occasions, we can find Chinese equivalents.Thus, the realization of cohesion is rather consistent in the translation of international treaties. However, changes still exist so that the translation conforms to Chinese grammar and, meanwhile, precisely conveys the complete information embodied in the original.