Explicitation Of Causal Links In Students' Translation

Explicitation is a special phenomenon increasingly concerned in recent years in the field of translation. It is closely related to language acquisition, language difference, cognitive psychology, translator's style and many other linguistic aspects. Many scholars have been investigating either empirically or theoretically to prove its existence or to examine its contributing factors and much has been achieved in these years. Benefited from the development of IT and a descriptive paradigm of research in the humanities, corpus is applied in the translation studies and a boom of the latter is then brought about. Based on a software-assisted retrieval and a followed analysis, the corpus-based research into explicitation can be basically described as a joint of a statistical comparison of the differences in the frequency and ratio of some linguistic units in ST and TT and a depict of their levels and tendencies of explicitness.It can be easily noticed that most of the past studies of explicitation are based on the analysis of the translations from those professional translators. It is in this respect that the present study first makes a hypothesis of the explicitation tendency of the fiction and non-fiction texts in both directions of E-C and C-E translation, then retrieves with Paraconc the causal links in PACCEL-W, a parallel corpus constructed under the leadership of Wen Qiufang. Upon finishing all this, the data-based analysis is made interlingually as well as comparably to detect and prove the previous hypothesis of explicitation tendencies.The interlingual analysis shows that there exists an evident increase in the numbers and frequencies of causal links in the translation of fiction and non-fiction texts in both directions of E-C and C-E translation. Variants of text type and direction have no detectable influence on the explicitation tendencies of causal links; the comparable examinations prove that the translation of English and Chinese fiction texts as well as English non-fiction texts can lead to a rise of the causal links ratio vis-à-vis the total word number of the text. Other more obvious explicitations than causal links in Chinese non-fiction texts are responsible for the increase of the total word numbers and decrease of its causal links ratio. The translated texts, compared to the the native texts, are more explicit in causal links.Explicitation, when explained from the comparative analysis perspective, is a rise of the text's explicitness level. Since the difference of language formalization or hypotaxis means that the explicitation in one direction prescribes the application of implicitation in the other, it cannot be used for the explanation of explicitation embodied in both directions, which can be proved by the work done in the present study. The translator's language proficiency and style potency may, to some extent, change his/her choices of linguistic units; translation is by nature a recognitive, hermeneutic and commentary activity of language processing that can lead to the addition of information. It is preferred in the present study that translating and the translator are two main contributors to the explicitation showed in both directions.