Strategies For Reference Translation From The Perspective Of Cohesion Theory

Reference items are directives indicating that information is to be retrieved from elsewhere.As each language has general preferences for certain patterns of reference,speakers are able to transfer the ideas,stories and emotions to the brains of the listeners.Given the fact that English is one of the Indo-European languages and Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family,the distinctions between English and Chinese reference pose various difficulties to translation.The report carried out a case study of the rendering of City of Dreams:The 400-Year-Epic History of Immigrant New York,a history book offering an exhaustive account of New York's immigrants from the 17th century to the present day and their profound influence in shaping the culture of New York City.The translation of City of Dreams is highly relevant to Chinese readers for three reasons:it offers rather rich historical materials and references on immigrant New York for the Chinese academia,facilitates the understanding of the immigration culture in New York and United States as a whole,and presents a new perspective on immigration issue,one of the global hotspot issues in the 21st century.According to Reiss's text type theory,City of Dreams is an informative text whose focus is on introducing the historical facts of New York immigrants and expressing the information in an explicit manner.However,English and Chinese have varied preferences for reference patterns in terms of the referential expressions,functions and frequency,making the translation of them difficult.Based on the samples selected from the ST,the study conducted a contrastive study of English-Chinese general patterns of reference which paid special attention to the controversial phenomenon of co-reference and generalizes four strategies-repetition,substitution,omission,and explicitation-for the translation of English reference.The report aimed to generalize a set of translation strategies in regard to English reference for future reference,with its major innovative point being the proposal of a method for translating co-reference.Due to the space limitation and inadequate samples,the feasibility of the proposed strategies in other texts needs further discussion.In addition,more research has to be undertaken on the loss of styles,semantics and referential functions that occurs when reconstructing the reference pattern of the ST.