Cohesion And Text Translation From A Cultural Perspective

This thesis is an operational study on the translation of cohesion factors in the textunder the circumstances of cross culture communication. From the early days of thedevelopment of textual translation, the focus of cohesion translation has been onvarious cohesion methods which belong to the same culture while the differencesbetween different cultures are neglected in a sense. From the perspective of translationtheory and practice, this thesis takes the relative knowledge of text linguistics andcross culture communication into consideration and study cohesion translation ingreat detail.Firstly, this thesis demonstrates that translation is in no way a simply problem oflanguage. It is closely related with the cultures that languages belong to. At the sametime the HE factors, which refer to the personal factors, also influence the wholeprocess of translation from the choosing of translation materials and translationmethods to the assessment of the translation. In a sense we can say that for a translatorthe bicultural ability is more important than the bilingual ability. It is put forward thatto achieve the equivalence of two texts from the perspective of culture is oneimportant principle that we should follow. The thesis analyzes such cohesion methodsthat are frequently used in English texts as reference, substitution and ellipsis,conjunction and repetition and makes comparison between the cohesion of Englishand that of Chinese. The thesis concludes that in Chinese-English translation,translators should make flexible changes when necessary, namely to make additionsor omissions according to the relative characteristics of the two languages.To put the theory into practice, the thesis takes Hemingway's famous novel TheOld Man and The Sea for an example. By comparing Hemingway's original work andWu Lao's translation, the thesis exemplifies the differences between the twolanguages and tells a much preferred way to deal with those cohesion elements. Thusthe thesis is not limited to the study of translation theory and at the same time it isdirective for the translation practice.