The Strategy Of Adding Conjunctions In Translating Chinese Classics

Zi Zhi Tong Jian (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) is the first historical text complied in a chronological style in ancient China. The studies and translations of this classic in the West mirror the changing perspectives and trends of Chinese studies in the western countries. Zi Zhi Tong Jian has two partial translations, which were produced by Harvard Achilles Fang and Sinologist Rade de Crespigny in Australian National University respectively and the latter one is renowned for its readability. An analysis of the translation strategies of Zi Zhi Tong Jian by these translators may channel the studies and translations of this classic in China and the West, which at the same time will definitely promotes the transmission of Chinese cultures in western countries.Explicitation, one of translation universals, has been gaining more and more attention from translation scholars at home and abroad. It is proposed that translators will subconsciously make the implicit information in the source text explicit so as to make the translation more readable and comprehensible. Explicitation is mainly realized by linguistic devices, such as the insertion of implied information, conjunctions and subjects, the transformation of rhetorical devices, reorganization of sentences and paragraphs, etc. Previous researches have been focusing on different categories in view of the differences observed between different source and target languages. Generally speaking, though, explicitation strategies are mainly investigated and discussed on lexical, syntactical and textual levels, which interlink to an extent that the translation is more acceptable and readable for the target readers.The development of corpus provides more objective and valid support for explicitation strategies investigation. More and more corpus-based researches on explicitation have been conducted to prove and testify the universality of some specific explicitation strategies. However, few explicitation-oriented researches have been carried out on the basis of a Chinese-English corpus of historical classics due to the fact that such a corpus is simply not available. This paper tries to draw some evidence for explicitation strategies based on a self-built Chinese-English parallel corpus of one translation of Zi Zhi Tong Jian—To Estabilish Peace produced by Crespigny, focusing on the added conjunctions in the translation with the purpose of testifying Gideon Toury's hypothesis about the interrelationship between explicitation and readability in translation.