Textual Cohesion and Coherence in Translation of Historical Text: An E-C Translation Case Study of The Revolution of 1848 (Excerpts)

Abstract

With the focus on the differences in English and Chinese cohesive and coherent means, this paper studies the E-C translation strategies regarding in transferring the coherence in Chinese version of the selected chapters of the historical book The Revolution of 1848.With Wang Dongfeng’s four types of coherence and Halliday and Hasan’s theory of text cohesion as theoretical framework, some typical translation cases from the excerpts are analyzed.It is found out: firstly, the major differences in grammatical cohesion between English and Chinese make it necessary that different translation methods should be taken to achieve the grammatical coherence. Secondly, for some means of reiteration, their semantic coherence should be reproduced in the target text; the translation strategies of complicated co-occurrence relation need to be adopted on the basis of specific context. Thirdly, in addition to the fidelity rule, the word selection should be in line with different stylistic features on the translation of various writing types, thereby forming the stylistic coherence. Fourthly, the cultural information hidden in the source text (by default) could be restored with annotations addedthento produce the pragmatic co