Inner And Outer Factors Of Coherence In Chinese-English Translation

Text linguistics (discourse analysis) is a young school gradually developed in the 1960s and a major branch of linguistics. According to text linguistics, text is the basic unit of communication and the focus of language study should shift from the level of word and sentence to that of text. After the achievements of text linguistics are applied to the study of translation, the development of translation theory and practice is significantly promoted.The research of text linguistics covers a number of aspects, and coherence, which is discussed in this thesis, is an important concept in text linguistics and is also the part in text linguistics that is closely related to translation. Over the past two decades, scholars at home and abroad put forward their opinions of coherence and factors influencing coherence from different angles. However, up to now, no agreement has been reached on coherence. Based on the achievements in coherence researches at home and abroad, the Chinese scholar Zhang Delu puts forward that the factors influencing coherence should be divided into inner and outer factors. The former refers to the formal connection among various linguistic factors, i.e. the cohesive mechanism, and the latter mainly consists of situational context and cultural context. Both inner and outer factors are important to coherence.In this thesis, the study of coherence is applied to the research of translation. The importance of cohesion and context (situational context and cultural context) in coherence is expounded and their application to text translation is explored with a lot of examples. To some extent, translation is to reconstruct coherence in the target text. However, because of large differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures, translation is definitely not the simple duplicate of coherence factors in the source text to the target text. So, in this thesis, the differences between Chinese and English in cohesive mechanism and culture and their influences on text coherence in translation are discussed.Guided by the theory of text coherence and with examples of Chinese-English translation from the Chinese classic Lao Can You Ji and its two English versions (Harold Shadick's version and the Yangs'version) as the research subject, example analysis and quantitative analysis are conducted in this thesis and the following conclusions are drawn:Coherence is an inherent property of the text, and cohesion and context play an important role in coherence. In text translation, the translator must conduct careful analysis of the two factors, which is necessary to the correct understanding of the source text and appropriate expression in the target text; besides, the translator must have a good understanding of both Chinese and English languages and cultures, adopt the appropriate translation strategy and make corresponding adjustments, so as to reconstruct coherence in the target text.