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

Focusing on the differences between English and Chinese cohesive and coherent means, this paper studies the E-C translation strategies for transferring coherence in the 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 a theoretical framework, some typical translation cases from the excerpts are analyzed. It is found that the major differences in grammatical cohesion between English and Chinese make it necessary to use different translation methods to achieve 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 relations need to be adopted based on the specific context. Thirdly, in addition to the fidelity rule, the word selection should align with different stylistic features on the translation of various writing types, forming stylistic coherence. Fourthly, the cultural information hidden in the source text (by default) could be restored with annotations added to produce pragmatic coherence concerning the preciseness of historical books and cultural differences between East and West.