Relevance Theory Based Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation: A Case Study Of Colonising New Zealand

Recently,moral perspectives about Britain’s colonisation have shown a pejorative tendency.The monograph Colonising New Zealand focuses on the history of the British Empire’s colonization of New Zealand and tries to provide an objective perspective beyond traditional moral calculus on colonial activities.The author,Professor Paul Moon,puts forward an organic empire ecosystem model to explore the global expansion motivation of the Empire and demonstrates the applicability of this model to explain the internal interaction of the colonial system.Moreover,the colonial history of New Zealand at the end of the 18th century corroborates the view that the imperial equilibrium could be reached with different colonial motivations interacting with each other,and this introduces a new framework for understanding various types of imperialism.Academic works of this kind are generally both informative and popular.Given this,the translator adopted the translation strategy of explicitation to meet the reading needs of both experts and general readers.At present,academic research on translation explicitation mainly focuses on its definition,translation addition,and explicitation universality hypothesis,while theory-based comprehensive explicitation framework elaboration generalized from and serving for translation practice on various types of ST needs further enrichment.This translation commentary studies the case of the translating Colonising New Zealand to summarize the application of translation explicitation on political history works from English to Chinese.It adopts the explicitation framework based on the relevance theory proposed by Elisabet Titik Murtisari,who classifies explicitation from scalar explicitation to categorical de-explicitation to save readers’ efforts in information processing,reduce the subjectivity of translators,and accurately present the TT features.This commentary combed every explicitation effort in the translation and concluded ten translation methods from it based on the four categories of explicitation mentioned above.To make a quick summary,the scalar explicitation clarifies semantic meanings and syntactical structure based on the original text.Categorical explicitation adds information to facilitate readers’ understanding according to the context and background.Scalar deexplicitation transforms the original expression in the readers’ favour.Categorical deexplicitation makes better omissions to reduce redundancy and misleading for concise and precise translations considering the language and cultural differences.However,in view of the limited length of translation,the conclusions of this case study need to be further verified.It is hoped more cases could be studied to enrich the explicitation translation framework based on the relevance theory in the future.