Translation Methods For Dashes From The Perspective Of The Cohesion Theory

This report takes Further Adventures of Lad as the translation material,aiming at exploring the translation methods of dashes under the guidance of the cohesion theory,so as to make the discourse smoother and more coherent.The book Further Adventures of Lad belongs to an animal novel,which vividly narrates the experiences of the dog Lad’s life in the third person,showing its impressively enterprising spirit,loyalty,wisdom and tenacious ability to survive.The author uses a large number of dashes,single and double dashes included.These dashes affect the contextual cohesion and the transmission of the semantic relation of the original text,which is a difficult point to be properly handled in translation.The dash,a common and unique punctuation in written language,functions as an important cohesive device.Though it is widely used in both English and Chinese,there are obvious differences in their usages.Previous scholars found that,the English dash is used more frequently than the Chinese dash.However,most translators often ignore the handling of dashes in the translation process,and only simply reserve or casually delete them,which not only affects the function of the dash,also makes the cohesion of the translation inappropriate and leads to the lack of semantic meaning.Starting from the cohesive functions of dashes,this report analyzes the single and double dash sentences in the translation material according to the semantic relation classification proposed by Huang Guowen,and tries to put forward reasonable translation methods for single and double dashes under different semantic relations.In this report,18 translation cases are selected,in which the semantic relations of the dashes can be classified into five types,including addition,explanation,contrastive,summation and transition.Through the case analysis,the author summarizes translation methods of single and double dashes,namely retention,conversion,adjustment and deletion,hoping to provide some reference for the translation of English dashes.