Cohesion In Textual Translation

As one standard of textuality, cohesion is a semantic unit. According to Halliday and Hasan, where the interpretation of any item in the discourse requires making reference to some other items in the discourse, there is cohesion. Cohesion is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the creation of text. It is achieved through grammatical devices and lexical devices. The former includes reference, substitute, ellipsis and conjunction; the latter includes reiteration and collocation. The using of these cohesive devices contributes to enhancing the coherence of a text.Cohesion is the center which text analysis revolves about, and which is also the vital element concerned in translation. It is the common concern shared by the two different subjects that makes the application of cohesion theory in translation not only possible and feasible but also valuable.Text linguistics studies language in use. It is about how sentences are combined to form texts or especially about how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users. It no longer restricts itself to the study of language, but rather relates to the world around and to the communicative function of language.Since the achievements of text linguistics have been applied to the studies of translation, the unit of translation extended from the word and sentence levels to the sentence group and the text levels, and text becomes the ultimate court of appeal in translating. A translator, therefore, is required to keep in mind the awareness of text which stresses on the wholeness and the unity of text. Cohesion is no doubt the first and foremost problem to be considered in translating, because it plays a vital role either in establishing the content and identifying the form, or in understanding the source text and reconstructing the target text. A cohesive text reads natural and smooth, whereas the text lacking cohesion will be ambiguous and hard to understand. Some translation works are not smooth or coherent although in which the words are in appropriate collocations and each sentence is well structured and grammatically right. That results from neglecting cohesion in translating. The result of this neglect affects the productionof the translation works and weakens the readability. Consequently, in translating, a translator has to study the cohesion in the source text carefully, and find differences of cohesion between the source text and the target text, and then explore appropriate cohesive devices to reproduce an equally cohesive translation text.To achieve cohesion in textual translation, explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion are adopted. Explicit cohesion is manifested in the surface language structures such as vocabulary, grammar and structure, and is always accompanied with linguistic markers (similar to "cohesive tie" raised by Halliday & Hasan and "discourse markers" put forward by Schiffrin). Implicit cohesion means that the logic-semantic relation within a text is coherent. Different languages have different text organizations and different preference for using cohesive devices. A translator should be familiar with the differences of cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts in the surface language structure, and make successful transference between them. Besides, he should get to know the features of English and Chinese texts in organizing the logic-semantic relations, and make a proper adjustment, thus makes the translation works conform to the norm of the target text.