A Study Of Text Translation Strategies Under The Guidance Of Cohesion Theory

In language communication, text is the highest unit in the language system, and participators of the language communication often deal with texts with complete meanings. The organization mechanism in texts is needed to ensure the unity of the text. As the core of texts, cohesion is the semantic relation of text organization and also a visible web of a text. In translation, the means of cohesion in original texts need to be represented in order to produce a good translation with semantic coherence. However, cohesion mechanisms in English and Chinese are quite different as a result of various differences in the two cultures, societies, ways of thinking, ways of expression, and grammar systems. Therefore, it deserves further discussion as to how to clarify language components, find the objects in cohesion, and achieve cohesion in texts. On the basis of the textual cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan, this thesis discusses the ways to achieve text cohesion when translating a text from English to Chinese.As a common type of text, autobiography essentially has a certain organization mechanism of texts to ensure cohesion on the whole. This thesis chooses the translation of a New York Times listed best-seller, the autobiography written by Sonia Sotomayor, as the case for analysis. On the basis of the cohesion theory discussed by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English, this thesis will analyze and compare the grammatical ways of cohesion in English and Chinese from four aspects, i. e. reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction, in order to find specific translation strategies for specific situations to achieve text cohesion and to provide proper methods for similar translations between English and Chinese.