Cohesion And Coherence In C-E Translation

This paper is an English translation report based on Mo Yan’s short story On theRoad to Sell Cotton. It is divided into4chapters, including: task description, processdescription, text analysis and conclusion. Among these4, the focus falls on Chapter3,i.e. text analysis, in which the author explores how to achieve cohesion and coherencein a translate text.Cohesion and coherence are two basic properties of a text. Since translation is aprocess realized on texts, but not on words or phrases, the translated text should alsobe structurally cohesive and semantically coherent. However, due to the greatdifferences between English, an Indo-European language, and Chinese, aSino-Tibetan language, the approaches to cohesion and coherence in these twolanguages are bound to be different too, which means a translator may have toreconstruct cohesion and coherence in the target textGuided by the theories of cohesion and coherence by Halliday and Hu Zhuanglinand through text analysis, this paper first explores, respectively at lexical,grammatical, structural and semantic level, how to establish cohesion in an Englishtranslated text by the rearrangement of the cohesive devices from ST to TT, based onthe cohesive mechanism of English.However, the cohesion of a text on its surface structure does not necessarilylead to textual coherence in terms of meaning or logic relation, and for this purpose,this paper further explores whether it is possible to reconstruct coherence in the targettext when the coherence of the source text is based on such implicit extra-textualelements as society, culture, history, etc. And if yes, then how?The conclusion of this paper makes a summarization and points out that sincethere is no fundamental difference between the explicit cohesive mechanisms ofEnglish and Chinese in terms of lexical and grammatical devices, the reconstructionof cohesion in a translated text can be facilitated comparatively easily if only a proper reorganization of the devices is made; however, when it comes to coherence that isbased on such implicit extra-textual elements as society, culture, history, etc. it ishighly unlikely, or even impossible, to reconstruct coherence in the translated text,and this is one of the major reasons why the translated text cannot in any way be acomplete equivalent to the source text.