The Explicitation Strategies In Chinese-English Translation Of Political Texts

Translation difficulties are usually triggered by the linguistic and socio-culturaldifferences between the source language and the target language, and this this particularlytrue of political text translation. Political text translation is primarily intended forinternational communication or publicity, elaborating on a country’s guiding principles andpolicies and facilitating the target language readers’ comprehension of such principlesand policies as conveyed in the translation product. In this regard, the translator oftenresorts to the explicitation strategies.Regarding explicitation strategies, there has been a large amount of research output byresearchers from both home and abroad. Overall, most of their researches are concernedwith the detection of the very existence of explicitation, and few of them examine in depththe motivations for such translation strategies. Against this background, the present study,on the basis of detecting the prominence of explicitation, investigates the explicitationstrategies in political text translation and aims to explore the motivations as well as theunderlying principles behind the explicitation strategies in the context of political texttranslation.The theoretical foundations of this study are Shoshana Blum-Kulka’s ExplicitationHypothesis, Danica Seleskovitch’s interpretive theory, Hans Vermeer’s Skopos theory andDaniel Gile’s IDRC framework.Three research questions will be addressed:(1) In the process of translating politicaltexts from Chinese into English, when do professional translators employ the explicitationstrategies?(2) Are such explicitation strategies prominent in political text translation?(3)Why are explicitation the strategies employed by professional translators under suchcircumstances?Accordingly, three hypotheses are put forward in this research and they are:(1) In caseof linguistic and socio-cultural constraints in their translation operation, professionaltranslators will make their translation product more explicit.(2) Translation of politicaltexts is mainly intended for international communication, and professional translators havegreater awareness of both this goal and the linguistic and socio-cultural differencesbetween the source language and the target language. Therefore, they tend to make theirfinal translation output more intelligible and readable to the target language readers.(3)Professional translators are able to process the source text in more depth owing to theirtranslation expertise and thus will utilize the explicitation strategies to convey theunderlying meaning of the source text. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted for the present study. First of all,an inter-language contrastive analysis is made of the source text and the target text in theparallel corpus by means of CUC_ParaConc V0.2(the parallel corpus software of theCommunication University of China) developed by Dr. Cheng Nanchan. On that basis, adiscourse-analytical study is also conducted in the contrastive study of the source text andthe target text. Where necessary, back-translation is also provided so as to cross-verify theresearch findings regarding the explicitation strategies utilized in the translation of politicaltexts.The examination of the explicitation strategies in the study focuses on the three majorcategories of explicitation: obligatory, optional and pragmatic explicitation strategies.For obligatory explicitation, the addition of personal pronouns is examined. It is foundthat the percentage of the personal pronoun is all together come to34.94%compare to thetotal sentence segments of5024. Optional explicitation is approached from two aspects:sentence-length variation and addition of connectives. For variation of sentence length, acount is made on a manual basis and it is found that the occurrence of the1Sâ†'nSsalignment is less than fifteen percent and the nSsâ†'1S occurrence only accounts for lessthan two percent. A quantitative analysis is made of the addition of connectives, it is foundthat the addition of connectives has come to21.57%compare to the number of the wholeoccurrences of the test items. Regarding pragmatic explicitation, the focus is onculture-specific items with added information and situational explicitation. Pragmaticexplicitation is primarily examined through qualitative investigation.As for the reasons why the explicitation strategies are used involve in the followingfour aspects: the translator’s conscious efforts to overcome linguistic constraints, thetranslator’s conscious efforts to overcome socio-cultural constraints, the translator’ssubjectivity and the translation process per se.The findings will supplement prior research on explicitation strategies in the field oftranslation studies. This study will also help translation trainers and practitioners to makemore informed decisions regarding the explicitation strategies in political text translation.Furthermore, the research findings in the present study will also have some implicationsfor compilation of translation coursebooks, in particular coursebooks in the field oftranslation for international communication or foreign publicity.