Coherence Equivalence In Text Translation From A Culture Perspective

This thesis advocates translation on text level to achieve coherence equivalence between the source text and the target text from the cultural perspective.The study of text coherence, which aims at what the inner and outer factors of a text have contributed to the coherence of it, remains only within one language and one culture. However, in the cross-cultural activity-text translation, few words have been said about how to produce a coherent target text to the target readers from the cultural perspective.In this thesis, first of all, the nature of translation is elaborated. Translation involves not only two different languages but also different cultures; that is to say, translation is a cross-cultural activity. Coherence of a text is always achieved by the readers' activating their knowledge in minds called schema. While in cross-cultural translation, cultural background knowledge in the original reader's mind may not exist in the target reader's. Without compensating for the culture background knowledge, the translation will be incoherent to the target readers; that is to say, culture is an important outer factor influencing the reader's coherent comprehension of the texts. So the achievement of coherence equivalence in text translation by compensating for culture background is proposed as a practical translation criterion in this thesis.The thesis concludes that coherence equivalence is worthy of being advocated for it is up to the date when cultural exchanges have become more and more frequent.