Cohesive Features In Learner Translations

Although researchers have recently shown an increasing interest in student translation, the cohesive features of students’ translated texts in Chinese-English translation still remains to be elucidated. To address this gap in literature, the current study aims to answer the following two questions:(1) What are the cohesive features of Chinese EFL students’ C-E translation texts at the tertiary level?(2) What are the problems, if any, with reference to cohesion in their C-E translation?Based on a framework of functional grammar, a meticulous analysis of50sample translation texts by college English major students in China from the Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners has revealed:(1) Students’overall ability to transfer cohesion in Chinese-English translation is considerably low. First, except the case of temporal conjunction, correct transfer regarding all other six types of cohesion takes up, at best, approximately50%of all instances, and, more strikingly, the worst has barely reached30%. Second, students generally do better in transferring reference than conjunction, which has demonstrated that conjunction may be a more difficult facet of cohesion for student translators to master in C-E translation.(2) Errors students make in transferring cohesion from the source text to the target text generally fall into three categories of lexical, grammatical and textual errors. Lexical errors include wrong spelling, diction, expression and collocation; grammatical errors encompass wrong verb use and misuse of clause; textual errors are basically related to inconsistency of pronoun use within the same context of discourse.The findings not only reveal the cohesive features of students’C-E translation as well as the common errors, but only offer practical implications for translation teaching.