Ways To Achieve Cohesion And Coherence In E-C Translation Of The World The Plague Made

The World the Plague Made,subtitled “The Black Death and the Rise of Europe”,is a groundbreaking historical account of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary changes across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age.In the process of translation,I realized that two major problems must be conquered in order to produce a high-quality translation: one is the translation of cohesive devices in text,and the other is the translation of the underlying situational and cultural information of the text.The report reflects on how to achieve cohesion and coherence of the translation.The cohesion and coherence theory of Halliday and Hassan serves as a direct guidance to optimization of the translation.In this report,the analysis is carried out on two levels,the linguistic level and the extra-linguistic one.Specifically,the former analyzes the translation strategies of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in the text based on Halliday and Hassan’s model;the latter discusses the translation strategies of the extra-linguistic elements affecting the coherence of the text based on Halliday’s elaboration of the context of situation and the context of culture.“Context of situation” explores how changes in language environment exert influence on coherence and summarizes three specific situational factors that affect the reader’s assessment of coherence,namely,experiential cognition,referents of person,and authors’ attitude.“Context of culture” considers the influence of broader cultural background in which the text is to be interpreted and discusses occasions to supplement the additional background knowledge.The innovative point in this report lies in the discussion of the three extra-linguistic elements and the generalization of specific translation strategies.This report adds cases to studies of translation of cohesive devices,and offers solutions to and insight into similar translation practice.