Achieving Textual Cohesion From The Perspective Of Thematic Analysis:Based On Translation Of The Other Wes Moore:One Name,Two Fates

Biographical literature reviews the life stories of leading characters mostly by means of narrative,which requires structural cohesion.In this sense,how to translate biographic stories into a text with cohesive structure and coherent meaning has become a significant task for translators.American Rhodes Scholar Wes Moore’s book The Other Wes Moore:One name,Two Fates is a combination of biography and autobiography,in which the writer describes growing-up stories of himself and the other man with the same name.The book often uses long and compound sentences.Therefore,translating those long and compound sentences into target text with cohesive structure is the focus of this thesis.The translator tries to analyze thematic progression models of the original text based on their thematic structure,a brunch of systemic funtional grammar put forward by M.A.K.Halliday.In a similar way,the translator reconstruct the thematic progression models of the target text by choosing the appropriate themes.Textual analysis focuses on textual cohesion and coherence.Textual cohesion consists of structual cohesion and non-structural cohesion,of which the former consists of parrallel and symmetrical structure,theme-rheme structure and information structure.The coherent models described by Halliday and Hassan pay more attention to linguistic internal form,especially lexical and syntactic levels.Besides this,Hu Zhuanglin also explains the theme-rheme structure,information structure,etc,which belongs to textual level of systemic functional grammar.In the mean time,Hu employes both English and Chinese texts to compare with each other,which proves that systemic functional grammar can apply to Chinese texts.This thesis shows how thematic structure guides the translator to achieve textual cohesion of the target text.Halliday establishes systemic functional grammar in order to provide a framework for textual analysis.When applying textual cohesion into comparative linguistics and translation studies,it is of great importance to guide translation practice.Among textual cohesion theories,thematic structure can specify structual cohesion of original and target texts through functions of their theme and rheme.The biographic book choosen by the translator mainly uses narrative method so it is necessary for the translator to pay attention to structural cohesion of the narration.During the argumentation,the translator firstly analyzes the thematic structure of the original text and finds out the theme and rheme of the original text.When doing translation,the translator analyzes thematic progression models of clauses and clause clusters of the original text,and then compares multiple translation choices to pick the appropriate theme and thematic progression models of the target text according to the thematic characteristics of the original text.In this way,the translator can see the differences of structural cohesion in two languages and make a breakthrough from clause translation to textual translation.To conclude,thematic progression models results in orderly text order,which means clause or clause cluster’s order is the result of deliberate choice made by writers or translators.Different orders can generate different thematic meaning and changing thematic progression models can change thematic meaning.Since English and Chinese both employ subject-verb-object syntactic structure,translators can retain thematic progression models of the original text in most cases.However,when translating long and/or compound sentences,translators often have to adjust thematic progression models in target text because these sentences might consist of marked theme or long attributive clause and/or adverbial clause.This requires translators to pay attention to the thematic meaning of the original text while considering the appropriateness of the textual cohesion in target text.