On Explicitation In The English Translation Of Tending The Roots Of Wisdom

With the appearance of a Sinology mania in recent years, the translation ofChinese classics has been accelerated. The history of translating Chinese classics intoEnglish can be traced back to early 18th century. Until now, many Chinese classicshave been translated into English, which contributed to the dissemination of Chineseculture and raised China's international influence.In view of the great differences between Chinese and western cultures, thetranslators of Chinese classics are required to add more words than those of othergenres in retaining and explaining the original meaning in order to make it clear to thetarget language readers. The reason is that Chinese classics usually omit sentenceconstituents such as subjects and adverbial modifiers at the discourse level andsyntactic level. Translators not only explicate the syntax and add connectives but alsoadd explanations of what is implicit in Chinese classics. Such addition and explicitnessare peculiar in translation and generally called"explicitation". This term was firstformulated by French scholars Vinary and Darbelnet in 1958. Since that time, scholarsat home and abroad have expanded the study of explicitation theory. They haveverified and proved the existence of explicitation hypothesis through corpus-basedapproach and textual analysis; however, investigating the translation of Chineseclassics from the perspective of explicitation theory is still in its starting stage inChinese translation circles.Tending the Roots of Wisdom, a masterpiece of idle talk in the Ming and QingDynasties, consists of the remarks and reflections of Confucianism, Taoism as well asBuddhism. The book, elegant in diction and refined in sentence patterns, abounds inepigrams about how to live one's personal life and social life. So the translation ofsuch a book is of great significance in spreading Chinese culture. Compared with the original text, its English versions are more explicit. Thepresent thesis, based on the examples taken from four versions of Tending the Roots ofWisdom, expounds and analyzes the manifestations and root causes of explicitation atlexical, syntactic and cultural levels through text and quantitative analysis.