A Report On The Translation Of Thinking As A Science(Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Coherence Theory

This report is based on the translation of parts of the book Thinking as a Science by Henry Hazlitt.The source text is about what thinking is and how to practice thinking.In short,it is a concise thinking tutorial manual,which is very enlightening for people who want to form a scientific way of thinking.The original text is a popular science text,featured by its accurate language,clear logic,strong readability and plain English.The language in the original text shows strong coherence in terms of grammatical structure and semantic meaning.As there are distinctions in the cohesion mechanism between Chinese and English as well as their speakers’ way of thinking,how to reproduce the coherence of original text into the target text is a challenge for translators.In order to reproduce the original author’s intention and realize the communicative function of the resource text,the translator tries her best to comprehend and translate the cohesive devices used in the original text,which helps the target language reader understand easily.This report is divided into the following parts: chapter 1 introduces the translation project,including the text content,and the internal and external factors analysis of the original text.Chapter 2 describes the whole translation process from the aspects of preparation,the translation process,and translation review.Chapter 3 is case analysis about how to reproduce coherence in translation from the three aspects of grammar,semantics and pragmatics.Chapter 4 summarizes the whole project.After analyzing the original text,the translator explores how to achieve the coherence of the translation from three aspects: grammatical coherence,semantic coherence and pragmatic coherence.In terms of grammatical coherence,the translator mainly reproduces the grammatical coherence of the original text from four aspects:referential cohesion,substitution cohesion,ellipsis cohesion and conjunction cohesion;then,the translator explores semantic coherence reproduction from the lexical level and the pragmatic coherence reproduction from two aspects,that is,cultural default and thinking mode.Through the translation practice,the translator firstly acquires a more profound understanding of how to form a scientific way of thinking,the guiding significance of cohesion and coherence for the translation of such texts,and then realizes that the reproduction of fluent translation must be based on the recognition of coherent features of the source text,the combination of the different characteristics about Chinese and English,as well as the proper transformation of the target text.During this process,the translator has a more accurate grasp of differences between the two languages,further promoting her own capacity of interlingual translation.The report aims at offering reference to E-C translation of the similar kind of texts.