Explicitation Of Logical Relationships In The Chinese Translations Of Shakespeare's Plays: A Corpus-Based Study

Blum-Kulka (1986) formulates the hypothesis that explicitation is a characteristic phenomenon of translated versus original texts. As one representation of the translation universal (Baker 1993, Blum-Kulka, 1986, Klaudy 1993), explicitation is considered as a technique to resolve ambiguity, improve readability by adding extra linguistic or extra-linguistic information in the translated text as well as a product in the translation. One evident aspect of this phenomenon is reflected by the use of higher number of connectives in the translated text to reveal the potential logical connection in the source text. This paper examines the explicitation of connectives in two Chinese translations of eight Shakespeare's plays (by Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqiu respectively) from the data gained from a parallel-corpus developed by Center for Translation Studies and Lexicography of Shanghai Jiaotong University.Mona Baker and some other scholars pointed out that the application of large scale corpora, especially comparable and parallel corpora, would provide substantial insights into study of explicitation in translation. This research, with the help of corpus tool like ParaConc, collects reliable and sufficient data and examples of the explicitation in both two translations in a comparable and parallel way. By close investigation of these explicitated connectives in the Chinese translated texts, this paper gives new evidence to the Explicitation Hypothesis and sheds new light on explicitation across Chinese and English language pairs. Efforts are also made to push forward the comparative and parallel analysis of instances of explicitness of the logical relations in two translations in order to find the motivation for this phenomenon. With a mix of theories constructed by previous scholars, like the relevance theory and risk management framework, etc, the paper comes up with two motivations for explicitation in translation: 1) linguistic motivation and 2) meta-situational motivation. The former one includes grammatical constraint of target text (TT) and the semantic necessity of the context. The latter one is more multifaceted, including individual preferences or habits, translators'conception of the readers and reader's acceptance, translation purposes, translation conventions as well as the situation in which the translators carry out their works.In short, the present study not only presents new support for the explicitation hypothesis with examples from Chinese translated text, but also probes into the deeper cause of explicitation, providing some new perspectives for future studies and practice.