THE COHESIVE LEVEL

Beyond the second factual level of translating, there is a third, generalised, level linking the first and the second level, which you have to bear in mind. This is the 'cohesive' level; it follows both the structure and the moods of the text: the structur e through the connective words (conjunctions, enumerations, reiterations, definite article, general words, referential synonyms, punctuation marks) linking the sentences, usually proceeding from known information (theme) to new information (rheme); proposition, opposition, continuation, reiteration, opposition, conclusion - for instance - or thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thus the structure follows the train of thought; determines, say, the 'direction' ofd'ailleurs ('besides', 'further', 'anyway') in a text; ensures that a colon has a sequel, that ulterieur has a later reference; that there is a sequence of time, space and logic in the text. The second factor in the cohesive level is mood. Again, this can be shown as a

dialectical factor moving between positive and negative, emotive and neutral. It means tracing the thread of a text through its value-laden and value-free passages which may be expressed by objects or nouns (Margaret Masterman (1982) has shown how a text alternates between 'help' and 'disaster'), as well as adjectives or

qualities. You have to spot the difference between positive and neutral in, say, 'appreciate' and 'evaluate'; 'awesome' and 'amazing'; 'tidy' and 'ordered'; sauber and rein; 'passed away' (indicating the value of the person) and 'died'. Similarly you have to spot differences between negative and neutral in say 'potentate' and 'ruler'.

These differences are often delicate, particularly near the centre, where most languages have words like 'fair', 'moderate', mdftig, passable, assez ban whose value cannot always be determined in the context. My third level, this attempt to follow the thought through the connectives and the feeling tone, and the emotion through value-laden or value-free expressions, is, admittedly, only tentative, but it may determine the difference between a humdrum or misleading translation and a good one. This cohesive level is a regulator, it secures coherence, it adjusts emphasis. At this level, you reconsider the lengths of paragraphs and sentences, the formulation of the title; the tone of the conclusion (e.g. the appropriateness of a toutprendre, en definitive (often tricky), en fin de compte, enfin(\), a la fin, en somme, en tout etat de cause to summarise an argument at the beginning of a final.

 

COHERENCE

 

The more cohesive, the more formalised a text, the more information it, as a unit, affords the translator. Consider first its genre. A Greek or seventeenth-century French tragedy; the agenda or minutes of a well-organised meeting; a recipe, a marriage service or a ceremony - all these compel the translator to follow either SL or TL practice as closely as possible. Similarly, if a narrative has a formulaic opening ('Once upon a time') and a formulaic close ('They all lived happily ever after') the translator has to find standard phrases if they exist. Other stereotypes - weather reports, surveys, enquiries, official forms, medical articles - may have standard forms, a house-style. Recent work on conversations of all kinds, stemming from Grice's implicatures and co-operative principle, tends rather optimistically to suggest that these run on tramlines which could act as pointers in the course of translation.

 

For a seventeenth-century French tragedy, the translator has a remarkablequantity of pre-information: the unities of time, place and action; a small number of aristocratic characters, each with their less well-born confidants or gouvemeurs; a lexicon of less than 2000 'noble', abstract words; various stichomythia sequences; alexandrine couplets, which she may want to turn to blank verse; other lines that parallel and echo each other; restricted length, about 1800 lines equally divided into five acts; a serious tone and an unhappy ending usually (not always) marked by a death followed by a brief explanatory epilogue, bringing the survivors back to normality, as in Hamlet or Don Giovanni.

 

Next, consider the structure of the text. Notionally, this may consist of: a thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis; an introduction, an entry into the subject, aspects and examples, a conclusion; a setting, a complication, a resolution, an evaluation; a definition of the argument of the title, the pros and cons, and the conclusion; a build-up, a climax, and a denouement; a retrospect, an exposition, a prospect. It may be useful to the translator to note deviations from these and other standard structures. Further, the structure is marked concretely by certain pointers; e.g. chapters, headings, sub-headings, paragraph lengths, and you should consider if these as such will be appropriate in the translation setting, and will conform to its house-style.

 

COHESION

 

Next we consider the relations between sentences. The most common forms these take are connectives denoting addition, contradiction, contrast, result, etc. These connectives are tricky when they are polysemous, since they may have meanings contradicting each other, e.g. cependant ('in the meantime', 'nevertheless'), inverse- ment, par contre ('however', 'on the other hand'), d'autre pan ('moreover', 'on the other hand'), d'ailleurs ('besides', 'however'), toujours, encore ('always', 'never- theless'), aussi ('therefore', 'consequently', 'also'), tout en + present participle ('whilst', 'although', etc.); cf. 'still' pertanto (It.), vse (R), zhe (R), 'why' ('for what reason', 'for what purpose', 'on what ground'), 'so that', des lors, ('from then on',

'that being the case', 'consequently'), en effet.

German notably uses modal connectives (mots-chamieres) such as aber, also, derm, dock, schliesslich, eben, eigentlich, einfach, etwa, gerade, halt, ja, mal, nun, schon, vielleicht, so uberhaupt, bitte, bestimmt - all these in talk three times as often as in newspapers and six times as often as in 'literature' (Helbig). Normally, these words can only be over-translated and therefore they are often rightly and deliber- ately omitted in translation: their purpose is partly phatic, i.e. they are used partly to maintain the reader's or listener's interest, usually with the nuance that the accompanying information is just a reminder, they should know it already.

 

Note here English's tendency to turn SL complex into co-ordinate sentences on the lines of Si tu marches, je cours, 'You can walk but I'll run.'

 

From Mona Baker:

Cohesion is the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text. These relations or ties organize and, to some extent create a text, for instance by requiring the reader to interpret words and expressions by reference to other words and expressions in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs.2 Cohesion is a surface relation; it connects together the actual words and expressions that we can see or hear (cf. coherence, Chapter 7). This chapter draws heavily on the best known and most detailed model of cohesion available. This is the model outlined by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English (1976). It is worth noting, however, that other models have been proposed by various linguists (see, for instance. Callow, 1974; Gutwinski, 1976; de Beaugrande and Dressier, 1981; Hoey, 1988, 1991).

 

Halliday and Hasan identify five main cohesive devices in English: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.

Each device is explained below in some detail, followed by an attempt to explore its relevance to translation.

REFERENCE

The term reference is traditionally used in semantics for the relation­ship which holds between a word and what it points to in the real world. The reference of chair would therefore be a particular chair that is being identified on a particular occasion. In Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesion, reference is used in a similar but more restricted way. Instead of denoting a direct relationship between words and extra-linguistic objects, reference is limited here to the relationship of identity which holds between two linguistic expressions.

SUBSTITUTION AND ELLIPSIS

Unlike reference, substitution and ellipsis are grammatical rather than semantic relationships. In substitution, an item (or items) is replaced by another item (or items).

 

Ellipsis involves the omission of an item. In other words, m ellipsis, an item is replaced by nothing. This is a case of leaving something unsaid which is nevertheless understood. It does not include every instance in which the hearer or reader has to supply missing information, but only those cases where the grammatical structure itself points to an item or items that can fill the slot in question.

 

CONJUNCTION

Conjunction involves the use of formal markers to relate sentences, clauses and paragraphs to each other. Unlike reference, substitution, and ellipsis, the use of conjunction does not instruct the reader to supply missing information either by looking for it elsewhere in the text or by filling structural slots. Instead, conjunction signals the way the writer wants the reader to relate what is about to be said to what has been said before. Conjunction expresses one of a small number of general relations. The main relations are summarized below, with examples of conjunctions which can or typically realize each relation.

a. additive: and, or, also, in addition, furthermore, besides,

similarly, likewise, by contrast, for instance;

b. adversative: but, yet, however, instead, on the other hand,

nevertheless, at any rate, as a matter of fact;

c. causal: so, consequently, it follows, for, because, under

the circumstances, for this reason;

d. temporal: then, next, after that, on another occasion, in

conclusion, an hour later, finally, at last;

e. continuatives: now, of course, well, anyway, surely, after all.

f. (miscellaneous):

 

g. LEXICAL COHESION

Lexical cohesion refers to the role played by the selection of vocabulary in organizing relations within a text. A given lexical item cannot be said to have a cohesive function per se (cf. reference, conjunction), but any lexical item can enter into a cohesive relation with other items in a text. Whereas on encountering a pronoun such as he or they the reader will automatically look to the surrounding text for its referent, s/he will not automatically look for a link between an item such as socialism and other items in the following example (from the book jacket of Arab Political Humour-, Kishtainy. 1985):

Ready suppliers of fun throughout the thirties and forties were the decadent pseudo-sovereign regimes of the West. More recently people have turned East for their targets, reflecting the new contact with communist countries and also the growing disen­chantment with socialism.

And yet, one intuitively recognizes a sort of lexical chain which links socialism with communist and East. Moreover, this chain stands in some kind of opposition to the West and, for some people, to decadent as well. We could say then that lexical cohesion covers any instance in which the use of a lexical item recalls the sense of an earlier one.

Halliday and Hasan divide lexical cohesion into two main categories: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration, as the name suggests, involves repetition of lexical items. A reiterated item may be a repetition of an earlier item, a synonym or near-synonym, a superordinate, or a general word. In this sense, it represents the same continuum presented on page 183 (with the exception of pronominal reference). This is repeated below for convenience:

There’s a boy climbing that tree.

h. The boy is going to fall if he doesn’t take care, (repetition)

i. The lad's going to fall if he doesn’t take care, (synonym)

j. The child's going to fall if he doesn’t take care, (superordinate)

k. The idiot’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care, (general word)

Reiteration is not the same as reference, however, because it does not necessarily involve the same identity. If the above sentence is followed by a statement such as * Boys can be so silly’, the repetition of boy —* boys would still be an instance of reiteration, even though the two items would not be referring to the same individual(s).

Collocation, as a sub-class of lexical cohesion in Halliday and Hasan’s model, covers any instance which involves a pair of lexical items that are associated with each other in the language in some way. Halliday and Hasan offer the following types of association as examples, but admit that there are other instances where the associa­tion between lexical items cannot readily be given a name but is nevertheless felt to exist. In the final analysis, they suggest, it does not matter what the relation is as long as we are aware of it and react to it as a cohesive device.

 

From Швейцер:

Одним из этих аспектов является отражение в переводе связности (когезии) текста.

Известно, что одним из проявлений связности текста является наличие в нем выражающих анафорические связи цепочек кореферентных существительных и местоимений. Наиболее элементарной цепочкой такого рода является имя собственное и личное местоимение 3-го лица.

Смысловая связность текста, цементирующие его анафорические и катафорические связи играют существенную роль в его интерпретации при переводе. В этом отношении чрезвычайно важен учет степени смысловой самостоятельности (автосемантии) его составляющих.

Прав И.Р.Гальперин, отмечающий относительный характер автосемантии отрезков текста. "Единицы текста — СФЕ, — пишет он, — играют неравноценную роль: они могут различаться... по степени зависимости от части излагаемого текста или от всего текста. Сама категория зависимости предполагает не только одностороннюю связь, т.е. зависимость от главного, основного, но и двустороннюю, выраженную влиянием зависимого на независимое" [Гальперин, 1981, 98].

Относительный характер автосемантии отрезков текста находит свое проявление в текстах любого жанра. Рассмотрим в качестве примера газетную статью. Обычно в английских и американских текстах этого жанра наиболее высокой степенью автосемантии обладает вводный абзац, который часто представляет собой конденсированное изложение основного содержания статьи. Так, одна из статей, опубликованных в американской газете "Интернэшнл геральд трибюн" (1986. 12—13 апр.), начинается со следующего абзаца: The continuing rise in the global sea level, which is expected to pose a major threat to the world's coastline communities over the next Century, can be stemmed through large-scale storage of water on land, according to two geologists.

Известную трудность представляет лишь словосочетание according to two geologists. В русском тексте подобного жанра ссылка на источник информации типа "как утверждают два геолога" или "по мнению двух геологов" была бы явно неприемлемой. Обычно в таких случаях во вводном абзаце статьи приводятся дополнительные сведения о лицах, от которых исходит информация. Сведения эти содержатся в одном из последующих абзацев, где приводятся фамилии геологов и указывается, что они американцы.

Выше мы рассмотрели лишь часть проблем, обусловленных связностью текста (кореференция, изотония, автосемантия и синсемантия отрезков текста, пресуппозиции). Как следует из сказанного, эти проблемы носят двоякий характер. С одной стороны, речь идет о сохранении в переводе тех связей, которые обеспечивают восприятие текста как единого целого. С другой стороны, важность проблем связности текста для теории перевода определяется той ролью, которую играют анафорические и катафорические связи между элементами текста в его смысловой интерпретации. Именно с этой точки зрения важен учет степени автосемантии (синсемантии) отрезков текста. С этим тесно связана проблема учета лежащих в основе данного текста пресуппозиций, выявление которых требует выхода за рамки высказывания и обращения к более широкому контексту, языковому и внеязыковому.