语篇角度上海旅游景点介绍的翻译(3)
Firstly, textual translation underscores that translation should be text-oriented and the text is the ultimate court of appeal in translating, extending translators' view from word-sentence level up to text level. Secondly, textual translation holds that text types and communicative functions of texts should be taken into account when it comes to translation strategies and approaches. Thirdly, textual translation highlights the significance of situational and cultural contexts, as text realizes its communicative function within context (see Li, 2002: 35-38).
3 The Application of Textual Analysis in Shanghai Tourism Translation
Ever since Gillian Brown and George Yule published Discourse Analysis which could be viewed as the classical vintage works of this domain, cohesive devices have long been studied as an extremely essential element of translation from a discourse perspective. Besides, cultural context also plays important roles in translating. This part, therefore, will focus on these two parts to show how discourse analysis is applied in Shanghai tourism translations.
3.1 Cohesion, Coherence and Cohesive Devices
According to Halliday and Hasan, (2006:56-67) cohesion falls into five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. McCarthy (1991:113-118) groups coherence into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. In fact, cohesion can be taken as a tangible linguistic connection in syntax and texts, whereas coherence inter-relates different informational factors in order to ensure a certain illustration of language.
Halliday and Hasan (2006) use the term "tie" to refer to a single instance of cohesion or one occurrence of a pair of cohesively related items. So the links between sentences and between clauses are called "cohesive devices" or “cohesive ties".
On the whole, it is generally acknowledged that text cohesion and coherence is realized through different cohesive devices, including grammatical and lexical devices.
3.2 Grammatical devices
Grammatical devices are widely used in a text to achieve cohesion and coherence. The following are some of the main patterns of grammatical devices:
3.2.1 Reference
References can be pided into two kinds: exophora and endophora. Where their interpretation lies outside the text, in the context of situation, the relationship is said to be an exophoric relationship which plays no part in textual cohesion. Where their interpretation lies within a text, they are called endophoric relations and do form cohesive ties within the text. This paper will mainly focus on endophora. Endophoric relations are of two kinds: those which look back in the text for their interpretation, which Halliday & Hasan call anaphoric relations, and those which look forward in the text for their interpretation, which are called cataphoric relations. (Comrie, 1983:78-80) Look at the following example:
1. Shanghai is the largest city by population in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the largest city proper by population in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities of the PRC, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010.
In this example, it is clear that it in the second sentence refers back to (is anaphoric to) Shanghai in the first sentence. This anaphoric function of it gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that listeners or readers can interpret them as a whole；the two sentences together constitute a text.