A Report On The Translation Of Cohesive And Coherent Means In Scientific And Technological Texts

The translation of scientific and technological texts plays an important role in disseminating new science and technology and meeting the demands of technological development.Many studies,at home and abroad,have been made on the translation of scientific and technological texts,but most of them are done from the perspective of the target text.Some scholars explore the accurate translation of professional vocabulary in the source text,while others do researches on whether the target text and the original text achieve functional equivalence and etc.They make insufficient analysis of the original text,so it is necessary to carry out further research on it.The cohesion and coherence theory is relatively mature and has been widely used to analyze English texts,such as literary works,political and economic texts;but it is rarely used to analyze scientific and technological texts.This theory emphasizes that the writer uses various means to make units in the text closely connected.This coincides with the traits,close structure and clear logic for example,of scientific and technological texts.Besides,it also has important guiding significance for translators to choose appropriate translation methods so as to achieve the coherence of the target text.In view of this,this thesis,guided by the cohesion and coherence theory,takes Chapter 5 and Chapter 13 of the book Perspectives on Free and Open Software as an example to analyze which cohesive and coherent means are used in the original English text and what translation methods the translator should adopt to make the translation faithful and smooth,and more in line with the reading habits of the target language readers.The source text is a typical scientific and technological text with many characteristics:a lot of professional terms,numerous long and difficult sentences,frequent use of non-predicate verbs and strong logic.Writers express their opinions and views on the phenomenon of open source software.The two chapters mainly discuss some project practices and achievements as well as some problems that open source software will encounter in the future.The author finds that writers adopt various cohesive and coherent means to make the whole article closely structured and clear in content.Based on the translation practice,the author,after reading the book Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan and related theories of other distinguished scholars,decides to analyze the source text from three aspects:lexical cohesion,grammatical cohesion and logical coherence.At the same time,the author also puts forward the corresponding translation strategies.Aiming at different means of cohesion and coherence,we can make a concrete analysis of each specific question and use literal translation,free translation,addition,omission and other ways to achieve the coherence and readability of the target text.Based on these studies,the author finally concludes that the source text and the target text cannot be completely equivalent due to different language habits and distinctive cohesive and coherent methods between Chinese and English.However,since the Chinese and English follow the same logical laws,we can make the target text highly equal to the original text from the perspective of internal logic,showing the value of the target text.The author hopes that this translation practice report can provide a new method and inspiration on how to deal with the translation of scientific and technological texts.