A Report On E-C Translation Of The Personal Librarian (Chapter 1 To 10)---under The Guidance Of Cohesion And Coherence Theory

This report is based on the historical fiction The Personal Librarian co-authored by American writer Marie Benedict and African American writer Victoria Christopher Murray.This book is published on June,29 th,2021.Up to the present,no Chinese version has been seen yet.As a historical fiction,this book organizes its chapters on the basis of the exciting and brilliant life experiences of the real historical figure Belle da Costa Greene.Due to the differences of expressions between English and Chinese languages,the disparities of historical,cultural and thinking patterns between Eastern and Western countries,there exists plenty of implicit information under the original text of this historical fiction.If the information hidden naturally in the original text is not manifested,it will cause disconnection and incoherence in target readers’ understanding.Besides,in the process of translation,the author of this report found abundant cohesive devices like lexical and grammatical cohesion in the source text for which the source text becomes logical,coherent and understandable.However,if the function played by those cohesive devices in English were ignored by the translator,the literal translation would lead to the incoherence of the target text.As a result,the author applied the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan and took theories concerned with cohesion and coherence from other scholars as a guidance to analyze the cohesive devices and implicit information in the source text from the respect of lexical cohesion,grammatical cohesion and pragmatic coherence,and to help the modification of the translated text.One the one side,Domestication was adopted to tackle the difficulties caused by lexical and grammatical devices at the linguistic level with the aim to adhering to the expression in target text;and on the other side,Foreignization was adopted to cope with the translating difficulties caused by implicit contextual information at the pragmatic level.Corresponding translation techniques such as omission,addition,specification and annotation are applied in this translation practice.Through this translation task,the author of this report deepened her understanding of historical fiction and cohesion and coherence theory,that is,the cohesion and coherence of a discourse lie not only in the superficial linguistic structure,but also in the pragmatic effect of its overall context,which indicates the mission of translators to bring translated text as cohesive and coherent as the original one to target readers.Hope the experiences drawn from this translation project can serve as a reference for later researchers engaging in the English-to-Chinese translation of historical fictions.