Asymmetry Hypothesis Revisited:A Study Based On E-C And C-E Translation Of Causal Connectives

Explicitation was first proposed by French scholars Vinay and Darbelnet in 1958.Explicitation refers to “stylistic translation technique which consists of making explicit in the target language what remains implicit in the source language because it is apparent from either the context or the situation.”(1958/1995: 342).Israeli scholar Blum-Kulka formulated explicitation hypothesis in 1986,which is considered as the first systematic investigation into explicitation.To test the explicitation hypothesis,researchers from home and abroad.Klaudy(2001)puts forward the asymmetry hypothesis which holds that explicitations in one translation direction are not always counterbalanced by implicitation in the other translation direction because translators prefer to explicit and often fail to implicit if they have a choice.Up to now,however,there have been very few researches on the asymmetry hypothesis and most of them put emphasis on Indo-European languages.Studies on Chinese-English language pair are few and far between.The present thesis attempts to conduct a data-based study on asymmetry hypothesis within the English-Chinese language pair.The data consist of novels within literary texts and political texts within non-literary texts.Literary texts consist of Wandering by Lu Xun(and its English translation by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Margaret Tayler)and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen(and its Chinese translation by Wang Keyi).Non-literary texts include The Governance of China and(and its English version)and Selected Inaugural Addresses by American Presidents(and its translation by Su Zonwen).Wandering is taken from online parallel corpus directly and the other three are sentence-aligned or paragraph-aligned,using Wordsmith.The sizes of the four sub-corpora are 135,071,103,345,157,165,and 112,035 respectively.The occurrences of explicitations and implicitations of Chinese causal connectives like yinwei,suoyi,youyu,yinci,yiner,coner,and so on,and English causal connectives because,so(that),for,therefore,since,as and so forth in the data are retrieved.Risk Management is adopted as the main theoretical framework to analyze the question of explicitation and implicitation in the present thesis.According to Pym(2015),translating is thought to be a risk management process in which translators distribute their effort in terms of the risks involved in rendering different textual elements.Risks are divided into three categories,namely,credibility risk,uncertainty risk and communicative risk.The degrees of risk are thus classified into low-risk,mid-risk and high-risk.The present thesis answers the following questions:(1)Do explicitation and implicitation vary significantly in the translation of causal connectives in literary and non-literary texts? Apart from text types,what else influences translator’s choice of explicitating and implicitating in the translation process?(2)What’s the effect of risk management in the translation process on explicitation and implicitation of causal connectives?(3)Can asymmetry hypothesis be verified in the translation of causal connectives in literary and non-literary texts within the English-Chinese language pair?The result show that the proportions of explicitation and implicitation in Wandering and its translation are 59.3% and 32.6% respectively.In Pride and Prejudice,the occurrences of explicitation and implicitation account for 55.3% and 40.9%.In non-literary texts,there exhibit 84.8% occurrences of explicitation and 26.5% of implicitation in The Governance of China.In Selected Inaugural Addresses by American Presidents,the proportions of explicitation and implicitation are 33.3% and 34.2% respectively.The result of Chi square test of the difference between literary texts and non-literary texts is p< 0.01(x2=16.169;df=1;p<.0001).It can be concluded that:(1)There exhibits a significant difference of explicitation and implicitation in the translation of causal connectives in different text types.Literary texts put emphasis on rhythm and aesthetic function.Translators have more choices when they translate such kind of texts.While non-literary texts concentrate on the reliability of information and feature plain and clear language,which aims to convey message to readers accurately.Translators are more careful when translating non-literary texts and there is less possibility for re-creation.Apart from text types,language itself,translation direction and translator’s style are also significant factors influencing explicitation and implicitation.(2)Risk management on the part of the translator exerts influences on the explicitation and implicitation of causal connectives.First,translators may establish credibility with their readers.Translators and readers often speak different languages which are characterized by different stylistics.Thus,possible credibility risk can be reduced through risk management to the most possible degree.Second,the influence of explicitation and implicitation can be considered before decision-making,when translators are not sure of taking explicitating strategy or implicitating strategy.In this way,uncertainty risk can be mitigated.Finally,different language pairs,text types and translation directions have different preferences for explicitation and implicitation.Risk management enables translators to have a better command of explicitation and implicitation of causal connectives.Therefore,communicative risk can be lessened,facilitating communication between translators and readers.(3)It has been shown in the results that though the overall proportion of explicitations exceed that of implicitations in both translation directions,a large proportion of implicitations also exist in both directions.In particular,the implicitation in Chinese to English is practically counterbalanced by explicitation in English-Chinese translation of non-literary texts,which contradicts asymmetry hypothesis.According to asymmetry hypothesis,translators tend to explicit in either of the two translation directions.Therefore,asymmetry hypothesis is not fully confirmed in the present thesis.There are two innovative points in the present thesis.First,the present thesis tests the validity of the asymmetry hypothesis on the Chinese-English language pair,whereas scholars have verified or falsified this hypothesis mainly through such language pairs as English-Hungarian,French-Dutch,English-German and so forth.Second,both literary texts and non-literary texts are covered in the present thesis,though most previous researches adopt literary texts,excluding non-literary texts.Thus,results and conclusions tend to be more reliable in this thesis.