A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Dash Cohesion In Maritime Texts From The Perspective Of Cohesion Theory

The source text of this report is selected from Sailing Seven Seas,which details the history of the Canadian Pacific Steamships,the maritime transportation arm of the Canadian Pacific Line,and tells the story of the company’s development through mergers and acquisitions and other means to continuously increase its transportation capacity and gradually go global.As a typical maritime text,Sailing Seven Seas is more specialized and contains more technical terms.It has the characteristics of long and difficult sentences.The language expression is different from ordinary types of English texts.In the process of translation,the translator finds a large number of dashes in the source text.Because of the huge differences between Chinese and English in terms of language characteristics,there are also huge differences in the use of dashes in Chinese and English.Based on the practice of Chinese translation of Sailing Seven Seas,the translator,guided by the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hassan,analyzed nearly 50 dashes in the selected chapters from the cohesion relationship between the cohesion content of the dashes and the main sentence in the dash structures.Based on the logical-semantic relationship in the inter-sentence relations proposed by Halliday and the further explanation of this classification by Hu Zhuanglin,the functions of these 50 dashes are summarized: elaboration,extension and enhancement.Moreover,this report discusses the function of dashes in the original dash structures and summarizes the translation strategies of the dash structure in relation to the actual situation: retention,substitution and omission.To sum up,the translator believes that when translating the dashes in maritime texts,it is necessary to analyze the cohesion function of the dashes.The translator should adopt appropriate translation strategies,rather than just copying the original form.By exploring and summarizing the translation strategies of the dash structure in maritime texts,this report expects to provide reference for the translation practice of similar texts.