On Translating English Cohesive Devices In Academic Texts

As a major feature of the text,cohesion connects separated sentences and paragraphs,promoting readers' understanding both in detail and in general.Every language has its own cohesive devices to realize cohesion.Cohesive devices adopted in English are not always applicable in Chinese because of the different cultures,thinking modes,expression habits and so on.Constructing cohesion in the target text then becomes indispensable during the process of translation.Based on Halliday and Hasan's classification of cohesion,the report tries to explore methods of translating grammatical cohesion in the academic text by taking examples from the book Intimate Memory:Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China,which focuses on the mourning literature in the Ming and Qing dynasty.Diverse cohesive devices are used in the book to show the rigorous logic and argument,so how to reflect the cohesion concisely and naturally in the target language should be taken into careful consideration.The research method adopted in this study is case study to solve the question of how to translate the grammatical cohesion in this academic text and why certain translation methods are adopted.Examples are given under each classification of grammatical cohesion,including reference,substitution,conjunction and their more detailed subdivision.In the analysis part,differences between cohesive devices in English and Chinese will be pointed out.Besides,the translation method adopted in each example will be explained.According to the analysis of the translation of the book Intimate Memory,several translation methods are proposed for translating grammatical cohesion in the academic text,that is,literal translation,omission,addition,repetition,rearranging the word order and application of punctuation marks(such as a comma).It should be noticed that each kind of cohesive devices can be translated with more than one method and each method can be applied to different cohesive devices.Hence,modifications according to different conditions are necessary.