Necessity And Operateability Of Paragraph As Translation Unit

Discourse analysis is a young discipline developed from 60s,which focuses on interpersonal function of language,i.e. analyzing linguistic facts in context and situation. Its findings and theories shed a new light on translation study and guide translators to shift their eyes from the level of words,phases and sentences to that of the text,so that they can pay more attention to the interpersonal functions of the source text. Translators are thus armed with theoretical weapons to explore more free space in structure reconstruction and adopt more flexible translation strategies to achieve functional equivalence in a higher level.The thesis proposes paragraph as translation unit and a top-down process of translation regarding source text coherence,structure and intentionality. The author offers theoretical and practical evidence to expound the necessity and operateability of this proposal,citing many scholars' findings and opinions,among which,Halliday's Cohesion and Coherence and Theme-rheme theories are applied as the theoretical background.To support the argument,the author first gives a brief comparison of Chinese and English texts,and asserts that the remarkable differences between the two languages make it necessary. In the meanwhile,paragraph in itself speaks for it-a paragraph bears more structure features than phases,sentence and meaning group;a paragraph can usually state a complete idea;textual coherence is judged and realized in paragraph.To verify the operateability,the author goes down to translation practice. The thesis does not stop at grammatical level but explore further the coherence beneath words,such as theme continuity,meaning joints,consistency of rhetoric,text type and style of writing. In addition to Halliday's four cohesive ties,the author studies also the process of topic shift,leap of thought,background knowledge compensation,etc.. Besides,the author discusses the ways to detect the real intention of source text and the information focus,as well as the methods to recreate them in the target text.