A Translation Practice Report Under Cohesion Theory

Children are the seedlings of hope,symbolizing the prosperity and bearing the bright future of a nation.It is natural that people worldwide pay much attention to the parenting and education of children.Since the opening of the two-child policy in China in 2015,the number of newborns has significantly increased.Furthermore,the concept and the methods of baby-raising have been of greater significance to the public.As the saying goes,“Three year olds forebode their adulthood;seven-year-olds their old age.” The age from 1-3 years old is an extremely important period for the whole life of a child which greatly determines his future development.Parenting of this period poses huge challenges for those parents in baby-raising and psychological quality,pushing people to highly emphasize the infant education not only by learning from the experience given by predecessors but also by learning foreign modern parenting concepts.Based on the above reasons,the author excerpts several chapters from the famous American parenting book What to Expect the Toddlers Years as the translation materials and writes this translation practice report on the basis of her own translation practice.The book introduces the necessary course of 1-3 years old babies' development and provides relevant notes of parenting including: subtle changes of a baby in body,brain,behavior and emotion,offering mothers relevant guidance.From the perspective of the second person,the author constantly encourages mothers to practice and study during the process of baby-raising.The study has been developed on the basis of cohesion theory raised by Halliday and Hasan whose mainly purpose is to convey true and comprehensive information to the public since the parenting text falls into the category of practical texts.During the process of translation,translators should maintain the effective information transmission,handle and understand the cohesion in the original reasonably to achieve a fluent logic of the whole passage.According to Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory,cohesive devices are divided into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion which is often applied to the researches of literature style and English teaching.In terms of language features of the original,this thesis mainly discusses the different characteristics of the grammatical cohesive devices between English and Chinese and analyzes their influences on the translation practice.This thesis is aimed to deeply analyze the similarities and differences of grammatical cohesion applied in English and Chinese expression through a case study of example sentences from translation practice under the guidance of cohesion theory,summarizing the advice on how to use different cohesive devices flexibly,the conclusions are as following:Personal pronouns in English and Chinese are different in expression and morphology.By analyzing the linguistic features of the original parenting material,most of the personal pronouns in English are represented by the changes in form,sex,number,and form while the third person in Chinese has sexual differences;English is a hypotactic language while Chinese is paratactic,the frequency of using personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns is higher than that of Chinese in order to avoid repetition in expression.In English,the definite article “the” indicates that the referents are specific and recognizable,the use of zero references and the reproduction of the original words are adopted to achieve cohesion through the passage during the translation process.The frequency of substitution in Chinese is lower than that in English.The nominal substitution in the original text has changes in number and tense,and the substitutional relation of the original text is usually presented by means of omission,and reproduction in the process of translation.The frequency of verbal ellipsis in the original is higher than that of translation.In the process of translation,the original meaning is expressed by the means of reproduction or other lexical means.In English,the clausal ellipsis is based on the syntactic structure while Chinese is based on the semantic structure.English tends to use conjunction more frequently than Chinese.An explicit logic by different conjunctive forms is shown in English while Chinese is inclined to show the implicit meaning by zero connection or paratactic relation,which depends on inherent semantic coherence.When doing translation,a translator should adopt proper translation skills and relevant cohesive devices according to the context for the aim of producing a complete and coherent translated text.