Choice Of Word Meaning In E-C Translation—A Lexical Cohesion Perspective

For a long time,researches on meaning have been given much attention to in translation studies.Among them,the study on word meaning is the most essential issue.Scholars from both home and abroad have conducted extensive researches and studies on the selection of word meaning and accomplished fruitful achievements.Nevertheless,these researches and studies are mainly carried out from the contextual,pragmatic as well as cultural perspectives.Comparatively speaking,studies on the process of choosing word meaning from cohesion and coherence perspective deserve more attention and exploration.The paper is meant to discuss issues on word meaning from the lexical cohesion perspective.Lexical cohesion,as the tangible connections among two or more lexical elements that are semantically related to each other within a text,serves as an effective method to achieve textual coherence.Since first put forward by Halliday and Hasan in 1976,lexical cohesion has been one of the most frequently used terminologies in translation studies.In their book Cohesion in English,Halliday and Hasan divide lexical cohesion into two types,namely,reiteration and collocation.Reiteration is achieved through lexical reappearance,while collocation is realized through the co-occurrence of lexical items which center on the same subject.By virtue of lexical cohesion,the paper endeavors to explore the rules of information processing in the course of translation and expounds upon the process of the translator's choice of word meaning by analyzing the lexical chains within collocation and reiteration patterns in English texts.These lexical chains are generally based on such semantic relations as repetition,synonymy,superordinate,antonymy,part-whole as well as general-specific words.It is hoped that the paper provides theoretical basis for producing accurate and smooth translated texts.