A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation And Implicitation In English-Chinese Rootless Back Translation

Non-native language writing is the literary creation about the native culture by applying a non-native language.Some works written in a non-native language are translated back into the native language.Wang Hongyin(2009)defined this special type of translation as "rootless back translation",in which "rootless" refers to the absence of the corresponding Chinese text as the basis in translating,and "back" refers to the return of culture,that is,telling stories in the native language.A typical example is the Chinese translation of the novel Moment in Peking by Lin Yutang.In recent years,there have been quite a lot of studies on translation explicitation and implicitation by applying corpus methods,but few studies have focused on rootless back translated texts.This study employs the corpus method to analyze the explicitation and implicitation features in English-Chinese rootless back translated texts.The corpus data of this study comes from two self-built corpora:a corpus of English-Chinese rootless back translated fictional texts and a corpus of Chinese translated fictional texts.This study investigates the explictation and implicitation in the English-Chinese rootless back translated fictional texts in terms of lexical density,degree of hypotaxis,particles,personal pronouns and conjunctions.A contrastive analysis of the English-Chinese rootless back translated fictional corpus and the original Chinese fictional corpus shows that there is no explicitation or implicitation in the use of pronouns and conjunctions in the former;however,a contrastive analysis of the English-Chinese rootless back translated fictional corpus and the Chinese translated fictional corpus reveals that there is obvious implicitation in the use of pronouns and conjunctions in the latter.The research findings suggest that there is no significant difference in the use of the above-mentioned word classes between English-Chinese rootless back translated texts and original Chinese texts.The findings do not support the previous claims on translation universals.There is implicitation in the use of particle words and prepositions.