Cohesive Devices In C-E Translation Of Biography Of Qian Xuesen And Translation Strategies

Biography is a kind of narrative literature which features the balance between literariness and authenticity.Furthermore,translations of biographies require translators to focus on accurate facts,maintain factual information and preserve their literary styles as much as possible in order to reproduce their original styles and achieve positive communicative effects.Considering the flexible sentence structures,rich literary styles and various writing styles in biographies,translators should have textual awareness to provide a clear,cohesive and coherent target text.In this paper,the author analyzed the cohesive devices of the source text and the difficulties for translating these devices and further explored corresponding strategies for achieving cohesion in the target text based on a case study on the Chinese-English translation of Biography of Qian Xuesen.After a thorough analysis,the author summed up the translation difficulties in cohesive devices of the source text from the perspective of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion,including unclear reference,subject omission and ambiguous conjunction;repetition and synonymous parallelism.By comparing different translations,the author concluded two strategies to achieve cohesive and coherent target texts.Specifically,the translator should adjust grammatical cohesion by identifying referents of unclear references,adding or adjusting subjects and clarifying conjunctions.Meanwhile,the translator should improve lexical cohesion by substituting repeated words and phrases and refining synonymous expressions.In general,it is suggested that this paper can provide translators some advice and tips in Chinese-English translation to help them produce more logical and cohesive target texts.