Reconstructing Cohesion In Translation

The concept of cohesion was proposed decades ago under the framework of systemic functional linguistics for the purpose of text analysis.Cohesion refers to the semantic relations between language items in a text,and such relations could exist not only within a sentence,but also across sentence and paragraph boundaries.It is through cohesion that unrelated sentences are logically connected to function as a meaningful text with readability.Therefore,in the process of translation,it is of vital significance to reconstruct the semantic cohesion in the source text so as to improve the readability of the target text.Previous studies on English-Chinese translation of cohesion mainly take sentences and paragraphs cut from various texts as linguistic data,instead of choosing a relatively complete text,which to some extent limits the in-depth analysis of translation of cohesion that transcends sentences and even paragraphs in a stretch of text.Intending to make improvements on that,this report takes the translation of the prologue and first two chapters of the text Proud:My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream(hereinafter Proud in short)as linguistic data,and adopts Halliday and Hasan's way of classifying cohesion,discusses how to reconstruct multiple kinds of cohesion not only within but also beyond sentences and paragraphs.Due to the fact that English and Chinese differ in linguistic structures and pragmatic habits,the five categories of cohesion(reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion)in Halliday's theory do not appear in these two languages in equivalent frequencies.Therefore,the translator should avoid adopting the single method of copying the cohesion form for the translation of all kinds of cohesion,and should choose the translation methods on the basis of case-by-case consideration.To address this difficulty,the translator decides to seek translation guidance from works of Zhu Yongsheng and other domestic scholars.To analyze the translation of cohesion in Proud,this report adopts the methodology of case analysis The case analysis is conducted category by category--under every category of reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion,examples are provided to support the author's analysis.For most examples,two translation versions are given for comparison of translation quality,with the second one being produced under the guidance of Halliday's cohesion theory and the first one not;in the analysis of each example,explanation on the differences between English and Chinese cohesive devices appearing in this example is provided and the method being used in this example is proposed.Through the analysis of the translation of Proud,two overarching translation strategies and four specific translation methods governed by the strategies are summarized.The translation strategies include:a)to identify the meaning of certain language items based on semantic cohesion not only within but also beyond sentences,instead of comprehending the items only through their literal forms;b)to adjust the wording of the target text based on the findings of contrastive linguistics(e.g.hypotaxis in English versus parataxis in Chinese),so as to make the Chinese translation more natural and idiomatic.The four translation methods include:a)omission;b)repetition;c)keeping the cohesion form;d)rearranging the wording.It should be noted that each translation method could be applied to more than one category of cohesion,and even under the same category of cohesion,different examples may require different translation methods as the condition of each example is different.