The Treatment Of Textual Cohesion In The Translation Of Academic Texts

This translation report is based on the translation practice of the first and third chapters of The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy--A Study on the Political Thought of Max Weber,Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen.The text provides a specific elaboration of the political thought of the three thinkers,as well as an analytical study of their influence and controversies in the course of the development of the times.The text is an academic text,which contains a lot of political terms and political concepts,requiring the translator to be equipped with rich political background knowledge.The text consists mostly of long sentences with a large number of interjections,and various types of clauses interlocked.Therefore,how to achieve semantic and structural connection and coherence has become a major difficulty in the translator’s practice.Accordingly,on the basis of on Halliday and Hasan’s theory of discourse cohesion,the author properly deals with the problem from the aspects of structural cohesion and non-structural cohesion with appropriate translation methods.Non-structural cohesion is related to the coherence of meaning between sentences and paragraphs,which facilitates and supports the coherence of the chapter structure.The structural cohesion achieves semantic cohesion and coherence through the alternation of the theme and rheme,and the interweaving of known and unknown information.Thus,considering the characteristics of the original text,the practice report will start from the above aspects,and summarize the translation techniques and methods applied in the process of translation by citing examples.It is hoped that this practice report can serve as a reference for other translators who are engaged in the translation of academic texts.