Research On Coherence In The Chinese Translation Of The Contemporary English Novel Atonement

As a major feature of a text, coherence is not only of high theoretical value, but also of practical significance. It is effective in evaluating a translation. This thesis chooses the Chinese version of Atonement as the research object for Atonement is a very popular novel at present and is full of irregular expressions such as speech disorder. Thus, it is worthy of analyzing its translation, because this can help the readers in the target language appreciate it better.This thesis focuses on the application of coherence theory into the Chinese translation of Atonement and holds that the process of literary translation is also a process of the recognition and reconstruction of coherence in the source text. By reviewing the relevant theories, the author believes that coherence is an invisible web in a discourse and it is the relevance between textual factors as well as textual and hyper-textual factors. Cohesion is also regarded as subordinate to coherence, because coherence is a matter of conceptual unity and cohesion is linguistic form. Coherence is achieved by the explicit relations realized by the linguistic forms as well as implicit sense relation gained by extra-textual factors. Discourse coherence involves many elements. This thesis lays stress on Wang Dongfeng’s classification of coherence in Coherence and Translation and conducts the study on Guo Guoliang’s disposal of coherence in his translation of Atonement from the aspects of stylistic coherence, grammatical coherence, lexical coherence and pragmatic coherence one by one. Each kind of coherence is elaborated in detail and illustrated with the examples selected from the English and Chinese versions of Atonement. This is done in order to judge whether the translator has a full understanding of the original novel and re-establishes the coherence in the rendition. All these analyses lead to the conclusion that the study of coherence contributes a lot in the comprehension of the original work and plays an important role in the translation practice.After the analysis of different coherence in the Chinese translation of Atonement, the author goes further to study the strategies of how to reconstruct coherence. Based on the research on the rendition, it is found that the translator adopts domesticating translation on the level of linguistic forms. On the level of culture, when it comes to the translation of some images with strong exotic flavors, he prefers foreignization in order to restore the original coherence. For those cultural phenomena which are unfamiliar to the target readers, he tries to fill up their cultural gap through annotation. However, there are still some expressions which detract from coherence in the translated text because of the translator’s disregard for the original coherent modes. Thus, the translator should restore the original coherence in the translating process with different strategies according to the features of the target language and on the premise of a full understanding of the source work.On the whole, Guo Guoliang is not sensitive enough to the coherence in the original text and chooses inappropriate strategies to translate some expressions, which results in the inadequate reestablishment of the original coherence. With the assistance of case study, this thesis attempts to emphasize the significance of keeping the original coherence in the translated text in order to guarantee the rendition a coherent and excellent one and at the same time, help the target readers to get the same information as the readers in the source language do.