A Report On The E-C Translation Of Furious Hours(Excerpt)

Furious Hours tells the story of Harper Lee,the American writer who began to conceive a new work after publishing her masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird.Casey Cep,the author of this book,decided to explore Harper Lee’s mental journey and to record her outstanding literary creativity and the legendary experience of her life free from fame and wealth.The book is honored as “One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019” by Time.Since there is no Chinese version on the market,some chapters are chosen to be the objective of this translation practice.Because cohesive devices are indispensable parts of coherence,it is necessary to recognize the similarities and differences in them between English and Chinese in the process of translation.At the same time,cultural context plays a significant role in coherence especially in biography.Previous studies on the translation of cohesion and coherence have almost focused on the transformation of cohesive devices while ignoring other factors.Therefore,on the basis of cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan and the research of Hu Zhuanglin and other scholars in the field of cohesion and coherence,this paper briefly summarizes the differences in cohesion and coherence and cultural context between English and Chinese and puts forward corresponding translation strategies to achieve the purpose of cross-cultural communication.This report first analyzes and generalizes the factors affecting textual coherence,namely cohesive devices and cultural context.Based on the cohesive devices categorized by Halliday and Hasan and the differences in English and Chinese texts,this paper analyses the strategies of transferring reference,substitution,omission,conjunction,reiteration and collocation.With regard to grammatical cohesion,several methods are adopted: omitting personal pronouns,replacing reference with referent,amplifying omitted parts,and transforming explicit and implicit conjunctions.In terms of lexical cohesion,the methods of preservation,rearrangement and reiteration of lexical cohesive devices are applied.At the same time,in order to achieve textual coherence,the methods of literal translation with notes,cultural amplification and paraphrase are used so that the features of biography is maintain to the largest extend.It is hoped that after revising and polishing,the translation could conform to Chinese readers’ reading habits.