A Study On The Implicit Cohesion In The C-E Translation Of Publicity Materials

With the development of text linguistics, more and more scholars have applied its achievements to the research of practice and theory of translation. The scope of text linguistics involves various aspects of research, in which textual cohesion and coherence is an important one with wide concern. How to apply the achievements of textual cohesion and coherence to translation research is a worthwhile topic.This paper applies an analytical model proposed by Zhang Delu based on Hallidian cohesion theory, with some modification by the present author as the theoretical framework to have a detailed analysis on how the explicit cohesion and the implicit cohesion are realized in the Chinese to English (C-E) translation of publicity materials with the focus on the implicit cohesion. The data are mainly collected from the government websites and newspapers, etc. Through the contrastive analysis of both Chinese and its translated texts, the present study has the following findings.Firstly, for the explicit cohesion, due to the similarities and differences in cohesion between Chinese and English, it can be more successfully reproduced from the source text to the target one directly or by some conversion to achieve semantic coherence.Secondly, for the implicit cohesion, it tends to be neglected by translators, thus the target text fails to achieve deep semantic coherence, which might lead to misunderstanding by the target reader. According to Zhang Delu, the implicit cohesion can be inferred from the cultural context, specifically in the situational context. Thus, the failure in achieving deep semantic coherence mainly results from the failure in the reproduction of the situational context. Besides, the author finds the main possible causes for the failure include the failure in reproducing the consistency of the three variables of the situational context and also the differences in thinking mode, aesthetic orientation and historical culture, etc.Furthermore, the author suggests ways to reestablish the situational context in field, mode and tenor. The author points out the reestablishment of coherence of field can be achieved by adopting semantic translation and communicative translation proposed by Newmark, reestablishment of coherence of mode by keeping the consistency of language type, and the reestablishment of tenor by keeping the consistency of communicative roles and language types. Through the reestablishment of coherence of these three variables, the target text can be as much coherent as the source text.