Methods For The Reproduction Of Textual Coherence In E-C Translation

With A Social History of England 1200~1500(Excerpts)and its corresponding translation as the research texts,the thesis is aimed at analyzing how to reproduce textual coherence in E-C translation based on the comparison between Chinese and English.Textual coherence,a term related to specific situations and cultural knowledge,is not only a semantic concept but also a pragmatic one.Generally speaking,it is a practical and feasible approach to divide textual coherence into explicit coherence and implicit coherence.Explicit coherence is reflected in grammatical coherence and lexical coherence.The former can be realized by reference,ellipsis,substitution and conjunction while the latter is possible through repetition,synonyms and antonyms,hyponym and hypernym,and collocation.When it comes to implicit coherence,it is mainly comprised of co-text coherence and cultural coherence.Co-text coherence is realized within the text by considering a text as a whole while cultural coherence has something to do with readers’ knowledge about historical facts,customs and so on.Based on the E-C translation of A Social History of England 1200~1500(Excerpts),the author maintains that addition and shift are effective in reproducing textual coherence.A Social History of England 1200~1500(Excerpts)is a combination of academic writing about British history in medieval ages,the language of which is featured with concision and formality.At word level,the expressions in the source text are abstract and precise.Therefore,wordsare expected to be added in the process of translation so as to make them specific and understandable to readers.In addition,phrases are embedded in a proper way to make the expression more clear.Apart from addition,shift is also an alternative means to reproduce textual coherence.Chinese prefers dynamic language while English tends to use static language.In E-C translation,it is necessary to shift the part of speech.In most cases,nouns,especially words derived from nominalization are converted into verb form.Chinese is topic-oriented while English is subject-oriented.Considering the fact that the subject of Chinese is more changeable than that of English,shifting the subject in E-C translation is conducive to reproducing a coherent text.