cohesion-and-texture

name	cohesion-and-texture
description	Diagnoses and reviews the surface cohesive network — reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion — reworked to the target language's own preferences; owns the surface ties that bind a text, not the reader's coherence judgement, which pragmatic-equivalence-coherence-and-implicature owns. Use when a caller says the pronouns or connectors feel off, the references don't track, or the text reads choppy.
kind	skill
status	ready
provenance	{"principles":["P004","P017","P018","P031","P038","P049","P068","P069","P087","P091","P112"],"claims":["C00161","C00162","C00233","C00234","C00235","C00236","C00237","C00238","C00239","C00240","C00241","C00242","C00243","C00244","C00245","C00246","C00247","C00248","C00249","C00250","C00251","C00252","C00253","C00254","C00255","C00256","C00257","C00258","C00259","C00260","C00261","C00262","C00263","C00264","C00265","C00266","C00267","C00268","C00269","C00270","C00271","C00272","C00273","C00322"],"evidence":[],"source_anchors":[],"authored_from_digest":"2f4f067d33601fe8ae007debe4db47dfa634092a522bf47b5cb3d3392fe4247a"}

Cohesion and Texture

Purpose

This skill reviews the surface network of relations — reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion — that ties a text together. Its rule is that these devices differ in preference and frequency across languages, so the translator must rework them to the target's own patterns rather than transfer the source's.

When to use

• The cohesive links of a text must be managed or reworked.
• Conjunction, reference, or lexical-cohesion patterns must cross into the target.
• The overall texture and explicitness of a translation is in question.
• A polysemous item threatens lexical coherence.

Procedure

1. Treat cohesion as the surface network of lexical and grammatical relations that links a text's parts, and rework it to each language's own patterns rather than transferring the source's devices (P004, P038).
2. Remember the five cohesive devices exist in many languages but with different preferences, frequencies, and combinations (P069).
3. Handle conjunction as the marking of a small set of general relations (additive, adversative, causal, temporal, continuative), adjusting conjunction and chunking carefully because it is genre-specific and reflects rhetoric (P017, P049).
4. Accept that lexical-cohesion networks cannot be reproduced identically, since every strategy (superordinate, paraphrase) reshapes the network (P018).
5. Trace participants and entities through reference — the textual identity between expressions — and rework reference patterns to the target's norms, since anaphora varies within and across languages and by text type (P031, P068).
6. Analyse the whole text through its levels of connection — thematic, information, and cohesive — and decide whether to follow source cohesion or approximate target norms by the translation's purpose and the licence it allows (P087, P091).
7. Guard coherence at the lexical level, since a single mistranslated polysemous item can shift a text's coherence (P112).

Inputs

• The source and draft target and their cohesive devices.
• The target language's preferences for reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.
• The translation's purpose and the licence to depart from source cohesion.

Output

Per finding: name the cohesive device, whether the draft transferred the source's ties or reworked them to the target's norms, and the correction that restores natural target texture; in compare mode weigh following source cohesion against approximating target norms by the translation's purpose (P091). Follow the shared advise/review/compare response protocol in ../../references/translation-equivalence-key-concepts.md.

Anti-patterns to flag

• Transferring the source's cohesive devices unchanged into the target (P038).
• Reproducing conjunction or lexical-cohesion frequency literally against target norms (P017, P069).
• Letting a mistranslated polysemous item break lexical coherence (P112).

Worked example

Source chains pronoun references and repeats an additive connector at nearly every sentence; a draft transfers both one-for-one and reads choppy and over-explicit. Diagnosis — cohesive devices transferred, not reworked to the target's own preferences and frequencies (P004, P038, P069): rework reference to the target's anaphora norms and adjust conjunction, whose density is genre-specific (P031, P068, P017, P049). Check no mistranslated polysemous item has broken lexical coherence (P112). Whether to follow source cohesion or approximate target norms is decided by the translation's purpose (P091). Residual loss — reworked ties shift explicitness slightly; note it, and hand the wording back.

References

See ../../references/translation-equivalence-principles-index.md for the full principle catalogue grouped by skill, and ../../references/translation-equivalence-key-concepts.md for the equivalence vocabulary this skill uses.

Provenance

Derived from principles P004, P017, P018, P031, P038, P049, P068, P069, P087, P091, P112, grounded in the distillation-only sources (Baker, In Other Words; Nida, dynamic and formal equivalence). The frontmatter provenance block lists the exact principle and claim ids, which resolve into principles/principles.yaml and analysis/claims.jsonl.