The Treatment Of Cohesive Devices In English Novels

This translation report is based on the translation practice of Chapters 1 to 9 of the novel Sold on a Monday,aiming to analyze the problems encountered in the translation process and find solutions.This novel is a historical one,with its background setting in the late Great Depression of the United States.It tells a series of stories about Ellis,a newspaper reporter,who accidentally met and took a picture of two children sold by their parents.Cohesion is the main feature of literary text and its devices play the most important role in the construction of literary textual coherence.The source text is rich in cohesive devices,which are embodied in the explicit cohesive role played by pronouns,conjunctions,synonyms,etc.in sentences,and the semantic logical cohesion between sentences through substitution,ellipsis and other devices.However,Due to the differences in culture and underlying mode of thinking between English and Chinese,how to deal with the cohesive devices in the source text has become a significant problem to be solved in the translation practice.Therefore,based on the relevant knowledge of cohesion theory,the report discusses the treatment of cohesive devices in this novel at two levels: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.According to different types of cohesive devices,the translator mainly adopts such methods as concretization,conversing cohesive devices and conversing cohesive wording,involving translation methods and skills such as free translation,conversion,and amplification,in order to reproduce the author’s intention to the greatest extent and meet the target language readers’ expectations.Through the translation practice,the translator has gained relevant experience in literary translation,had a deeper understanding of cohesion theory and the necessity of cohesion in novel texts.The translator has also improved the ability to find,solve and summarize translation problems.It’s hoped that this report could provide reference for the translation of the same type of text.