Strategies For Translating Dash Under The Guidance Of Cohesion Theory

This report carries out a case study of the translation of Translation in the Malay World-Different Communities,Different Agendas.Translation in the Malay World,as an academic paper,mainly focuses on the translation activities and history in Indonesia from 19th century to 20th century.The source text is of great value for the studies of translation activity in Indonesia.With a total of 15000 characters,this paper contains 37 sentences with dash.Translating dashes in the source text is a big challenge.According to text typology put forward by Katharina Reiss,Translation in the Malay World is an informative text.And the text type determines the general method of translating.Unlike expressive text and operative text,the main function of informative text is to convey information.In order to convey information accurately,translator should not only analyze the semantic relation between sentences and clauses carefully,but also pay attention to the cohesive devices in the source text.Only by doing so can translators achieve accuracy,coherence as well as readability.However,many linguists also point out that punctuation marks can also function as a cohesive device.Therefore,while translating,translator should also analyze the cohesive function of punctuation marks rather than simply copy the punctuation marks or delete the punctuation marks.In this report,I will discuss the strategies for translating dash under the guidance of cohesion theory.In order to realize accuracy,readability and transparency,I adopt different methods such as retaining the dash,transforming the dash into other punctuation marks as well as deleting the dash.Through this report,I will have a better understanding about methods on translating dash.