A Study Of Coherence In The Translation Of The Midnight Watch

The thesis is based on the translation practice of The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian,a history fiction written by David Dyer who has a detective's nose for motive,and an artist's eye for detail.He turns the sparse and contradictory record of why the nearby Californian did not go to the aid of the sinking Titanic into a gripping novel of flawed people,missed chances,and suspense.In the process of translation,the translator came across a complicated problem about how to deal with the cohesive devices in English and achieve semantic coherence in Chinese.There are quite a lot cohesive devices in the original text and it is not acceptable to translate them word by word.So the translator did some researches on cohesion and coherence,analyzed the similarities and disimilarities between Chinese and English,and finally summarized some effective methods dealing with this problem.The thesis is based on the theory of cohesion and coherence put forward by Halliday and Hasan.They defined cohesion as a semantic concept which refers to relations of meaning existing within a text.Coherence is one of the impotant features of a text,combining words,clauses and groups in a logical and proper way.As an important part of semantic structure within a text,coherence should be placed at crucial status especially in translation practice.Based on the textual linguistics theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan,this thesis will analyze the significance of lexical cohesion and semantic coherence in E-C translation.Through studying the similarity and dissimilarities of cohesion devices in both English and Chinese text,the thesis mainly explores three ways handling the cohesion devices in the source text to achieve semantic coherence in the target text.