Reconstructing Coherence On Text-Based Translation

Cohesion and coherence have been of great concern in the linguistic circles since the establishment of cohesion theory in the nineteen seventies marked by the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English. The term "coherence" is studied and approached from very diverted perspectives and at different levels. Many linguists and scholars have been studying them and have tried to establish the relation between them and their importance in the creation of a text. Most scholars regard it as the underlying semantic meaning between sentences. Some believe coherence exists at lower levels. Based on the study of some influential text linguists, So far there is no complete agreement which reaches over the definitions of it.Coherence is an invisible network for the text organization, which concerns the logical or functional relation underlying a given text. Because textual coherence is rather a complicated phenomenon requiring the participation of many aspects of factors, such as semantics, pragmatics, logic and psychology, so, text coherence must be approached both intra-textually and extra-textually for successful communication. The author of this thesis believes that the coherence should be established from the semantic coherence, pragmatic coherence and coherence of the text structures.The structure of this thesis goes as follows:The introduction section presents different interpretations about coherence by some distinguished linguists both at home and abroad. Coherence is approached from a wide variety of perspectives based on divergent classifications. In order to reconstruct coherence properly in cross-cultural text interpretation, the author puts forward that coherence should be discussed from the following three angles: semantic coherence, pragmatic coherence and coherence of text structure.The first chapter is a theoretical basis for this thesis by providing a brief introduction to some basic notions relevant to this topic: text as a translation unit, the relationship between translation and coherence and the relationship between coherence and cohesion.The following chapter firstly introduces the concept of the semantic coherence. Then the author discusses the realization of the semantic coherence intra-textually in terms of text translation on the basis of comparisons between Chinese and English. It is pointed out that proper shifts of the cohesive devices and lexical cohesion caused by linguistic and cultural disparities are frequently required to ensure a coherent translation.The third chapter mainly deals with the pragmatic coherence. Whether a text is coherent or not extra-textually relies on the context and the readers' pragmatic knowledge and imagination to process the text. The author has introduced the cultural context to support his thesis, and some translational strategies have been put forward by the author to reconstruct coherence in terms of different cultural schema.The last chapter deals with the reconstruction of coherence in cross-cultural text interpretation from the angle of the text organization. Different thinking modes between English and Chinese lead to the different text structures, a proper structure rearrangement will definitely ensure the successful communication.The author points out the limitations and problems that remain to be solved in the conclusion.To support the author's view, some translation examples both from English to Chinese and Chinese to English are cited and the selected text types are broad: novels, essays, etc.