Challenges In Achieving Logical Coherence In United Nations Conference Documents And Coping Strategies

Based on a case study of the UN documents the author translated in an online internship program offered by the UN Chinese Translation Service in New York,this paper discusses the challenges and strategies of achieving logical coherence in the original English text,with a view to providing some insights into delivering logically coherent translation.The thesis first introduces the basic information of the case,including its background,process,language features and revision overview.Then,with the help of previous literature,the thesis introduces coherence,especially logical coherence in text,and analyzes the necessity of achieving logical coherence in the case.The thesis analyzes with specific cases challenges in achieving logical coherence when translating UN documents from three perspectives: inter-word,intra-sentence and inter-sentence.At last,by summarizing and comparing the typical examples in the author’s translation practice,the thesis proposes corresponding strategies for the above challenges: identifying the meaning of polysemy based on the context,analyzing the context to identify the meaning of near-synonyms,using in-text background information to determine which part the modifiers belong to,adding or rearranging information to avoid logic ambiguity,and reshuffling logic to deal with the logical mindset differences between Chinese and English.The analysis in this paper can provide more examples for related study on logical coherence in translation of UN documents,and hopefully the proposed translation strategies can offer some inspirations for translation practitioners who encounter similar translation problems in achieving logical coherence.