Methods For Translating English Pronominal Reference To Chinese Under The Cohesion Theory

The report analyzes the translation of American writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s nonfiction novel Under a White Sky:The Nature of the Future.The thought-provoking work documents Kolbert’s journeys to explore the geoengineering projects in the United States,Oceania,and the Nordic region,revealing the essence of the projects:the control of nature.It awakes the readers’ awareness.This report focuses on the methods for translating pronominal reference in the task under the instruction of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory and relevant studies both at home and abroad.The writer analyzes the linguistic features of the source text in order to improve the translation quality.The source text is featuring formal language and literacy instinct.With a large proportion of factual descriptions,cohesive devices are widely used in the text to guarantee its clarity and coherence.Of all types of cohesive devices,pronominal reference enjoys relatively high frequency with the need of referring to various projects,items,and personnel.In addition,the text records dialogues between Kolbert and interviewees,which include a variety of pronouns.The writer reckons that proper translation of pronouns can improve the quality of translation and keep the language of the target text in the style of nonfiction novels.In this sense,the writer discusses the methods for translating pronouns in the report.Halliday and Hasan categorize English cohesive devices into two types:grammatical and lexical cohesive devices.Grammatical devices include reference,conjunction,ellipsis and substitution.Personal and demonstrative pronouns can be seen as co-reference.The writer teases out the rules of pronouns in modern Mandarin Chinese and English,reviews previous studies on the translation methods for cohesive devices,analyzes the ST and the TT,and then classifies methods for translating pronominal reference in the translation task:Correspondence,Conversion,Omission,and Addition.Since modern Mandarin is more flexible in syntax,the original pronouns in the ST can be maintained in the TT in some cases.That said,the differences between English and Chinese require conversion in translation.Due to the repositioning of the sentence components,the pronouns will be converted to nouns or other forms.The pronouns will be omitted when several sentences combine in the TT.When complex sentences are separated into several clauses,it is necessary to add pronouns in the translation.The report analyzes specific cases to present the situations in which the above methods can be applied.The methods for translating pronominal reference applied in the translation task aim to make sure that language of the TT can be consistent with that of nonfiction novels.In addition,the writer hopes the application of the above methods can guarantee that the information can be fully conveyed and that can meet the expectation of the target readers.The research also provides feasible solutions to translating multiple pronouns and transforming punctuation marks into pronouns.It sheds light on further studies on nonfiction novel translation and cohesive devices translation.