What it is
Cohesion is the set of surface devices by which a text signals that its parts belong together: reference by pronoun, demonstrative or definite article; substitution; ellipsis; connectives; and lexical linkage through repetition. A cohesion change alters those devices. A repeated noun becomes a pronoun, an omitted element is spelled out, a connective is added, dropped or exchanged for one that marks a different relation.
Chesterman lists the operation as G8. Behind it stands Halliday and Hasan's account of cohesion in English, which supplies the categories, and Blum-Kulka's study of shifts of cohesion and coherence, the standard reference for the observation that translated texts routinely differ from their sources in cohesive explicitness. The two do different jobs: Blum-Kulka describes an empirical tendency, Chesterman names the operation.
Two neighbours need separating. Coherence change, Chesterman's Pr6, concerns the arrangement of the ideas rather than the surface signals that link them; a text can be reorganized without any cohesive device changing, and every device can change while the argument runs in the same order. Explicitation is a category of a different kind, defined by what the reader gains rather than by the grammar touched: adding a connective that makes a recoverable relation overt is a cohesion change by form and an explicitation by effect, and both labels hold.
When it applies
- The source drops subject pronouns and the target requires them, so every dropped referent has to be recovered and named.
- Tolerance for lexical repetition differs, and a term repeated in the source reads as an oversight in the target, or the reverse.
- The connective inventories do not match, particularly where one language has argumentative particles the other lacks.
- The target grammar forces a distinction, such as gender on pronouns, that the source reference form does not make.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Dilekçeyi verdi ve sonucu bekledi.
- Target: She submitted the petition and waited for the decision.
- Comment: Turkish marks person on the verb and omits the pronoun; English needs an overt subject. The change is small and obligatory, and it settles something the source left open, since the Turkish third person marks no gender. Where the referent is not established elsewhere, that is a decision to record rather than a grammatical detail.
DE>EN
- Source: Der Vertrag wurde am 1. Juni geschlossen. Derselbe tritt am 1. Juli in Kraft.
- Target: The contract was concluded on 1 June. It enters into force on 1 July.
- Comment: Administrative German uses a demonstrative substitute where English uses a plain pronoun. Reproducing the substitution puts the English into a register that survives only in pastiche. The reference is kept and a formality marker is lost, which is a candidate for compensation elsewhere if that formality is part of what the document conveys.
FR>EN
- Source: Or, le tribunal n'a pas examiné ce moyen.
- Target: The court, however, did not examine this plea.
- Comment: The French connective marks a turning step in an argument, the introduction of the fact on which the reasoning pivots. English has no single-word counterpart of the same argumentative value: the adversative carries the contrast but not the sense of a decisive move. Losses of this kind stay invisible unless the passage is read as an argument.
Watch out for
Cohesion is the layer at which translators most often improve a text without noticing. Replacing the third occurrence of a term with a pronoun reads better and can dissolve a distinction the text was maintaining.
- Legal and technical drafting repeats on purpose. Where a defined term recurs, substituting a pronoun or a synonym invites the reader to ask whether something else is meant. Repetition there is disambiguation, not clumsiness.
- Adding a connective attributes a relation to the author. If it was recoverable from the source, the addition is an explicitation; if not, it is an addition of information.
- Filling an ellipsis and resolving a pronoun both name what the source left unnamed. Antecedents are sometimes genuinely ambiguous, and in disputed documents the ambiguity may be the point at issue. Preserve it where the grammar allows, and flag it where it does not.
References
- Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
- Blum-Kulka, S. (1986). "Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation." In J. House & S. Blum-Kulka (eds), Interlingual and Intercultural Communication. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, pp. 17–35.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.