Cohesion, Coherence And Translation--A Text Linguistics Approach

Linguistics has become the most influential and central issue in translation study. In particular, with the rise and development of text linguistics over the last three decades, translation-oriented text analysis has become an evolving subject of interest in translation study. Cohesion is the most useful constituent of discourse analysis or text linguistics applicable to translation. Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical and other relations, which provide links between various parts of the text. Coherence is a network of relations, which organize and create a text and the network of conceptual relations which underlie the surface text. Coherence involves the whole text, and is of greater importance and help for the translator to reproduce a text.This dissertation draws on the combination of theoretical insights about textual coherence obtained both in text-linguistics and in translation study, attempting to study why textual coherence counts in translation, and how it can be reconstructed in English-Chinese translation. This thesis falls into six chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to its structure and the purpose of writing this thesis.Chapter Two is the explanation of important concepts such as text, texture, cohesion, discourse and coherence.Chapter Three is the description of textual coherence in translation. This chapter marks the beginning of my attempts to apply text analysis to translation, especially exploring the role of textual coherence in text analysis, and hence in translation.Chapter Four, Having outlined the theoretical setting, the author attempts to use some linguistic theories to evaluate the textual coherence in translation in order to theoretically test the validity of coherence analysis as an instrument for describing text understanding and reproduction.Chapter Five gives a discussion about strategies of reconstructing textual coherence in E-C translation. Chapter Six is a concluding chapter.