It is the perspective of someone engaged in the compilation of an anthology, in English translation, of the views, statements, discussions and records about translation – as an activity and as a cultural practice – in China, from ancient times to the Revolution of 1911. But is cross-cultural understanding as straight forward and unproblematic as this metaphor implies? In this paper, the question of the nature and limits of cross-cultural understanding will be examined from a specific perspective. To facilitate cross-cultural understanding is often considered a distinct aspect of the general purpose and function of translation, as the popular metaphor of translation as a bridge testifies. It is argued that possible causes for the disparities include cross-linguistic differences and extra-linguistic factors, such as generic, socio-cultural and translators' strategic differences. Specifically, the conjunctives tend to become implicit in the translation of prospectuses but explicit in the translation of legislative texts. The findings show that conjunctive patterns in the two subgenres are different from one another in wording and frequency and in the use of translation methods. Based on the cohesion model developed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), the present research proposes seven categories of conjunctives for investigation and compares the conjunctive patterns between two legal subgenres, namely prospectuses and legislative texts, through a corpus-based approach. From the perspective of logic production and reproduction in legal texts, this paper investigates the use of conjunctions in legal documents and their translations and discusses how conjunctions help the logical flow of information in legal documents. However, this phenomenon has not drawn enough attention from researchers.
The proper use of conjunctive cohesion in legal documents is very important in configurating the logical flow of translations.
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