Text-oriented Translating In Light Of Discourse Analysis

The rapid surge of text linguistics since1960s has prompted more and more linguistsin the west to introduce discourse theories into the filed of translation study and shed newlight on the latter. According to the functional grammatical linguists represented by M.A.K.Halliday, the language unit in use is discourse (or text), other than grammatical units suchas words or sentences. Discourse is the premise to gain an accurate knowledge of theoriginal text. The proper constructing of a target text cannot do without a comprehensiveanalysis of the original text to reproduce the textual meaning and its function. Therefore,it’s justified to regard text as the unit of translation in translation activities. This kind oftext-oriented translation analysis helps translators to get rid of the traditionally staticmethod of translation which emphasizes word-word or sentence-sentence equivalence andto turn to the dynamic process of semantic equivalence stressing more on function thanform.This paper intends to probe into the similarities and differences between English andChinese texts in their use of cohesion ties, coherence mechanism and contexts on the basisof discourse analysis theory and translation theory, regarding text as the translation unit.Despite the fact that the two languages share a common classification of cohesive devices,which include lexical cohesion, reference, substitution and ellipsis, differences do exist inthe using of these cohesive ties. Generally, English as a hypotactic language tends to use more explicit cohesive devices in its text with rigor grammar. Whereas, Chinese as aparatactic language features loose grammar and its text relies more on implicit semanticrelations and logic inferring.In the concrete translation process, an overall analysis of cohesion devices, coherencemechanism and contexts is needed to straighten out the logic relations and the discoursestructure so as to grasp the content of the original text and convey its function and purposein the target language with faithfulness and expressiveness.