An Investigation Of Explicitation In English Translations Of Hong Lou Meng

Explicitation is currently one of the most intensively studied phenomena within the field of descriptive translation studies. Olohan and Baker (2000:142) suggest that among studies of translation "universals", the general preference has been given to explicitation. First introduced by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995:342) as "a stylistic translation technique which consists of making explicit in the target language what remains implicit in the source language", this recurrent feature has attracted considerable interests among translation scholars in the years to follow. The explicitation has since then been defined and the explicitation hypothesis has been predicted and confirmed by numerous researchers, whose deliberate studies covered a wide range of languages and literatures and explored explicitations of all possible forms. While a systematic study of explicitation as a translation universal was initiated decades ago in western countries and has since then been intensively conducted, it is only a recent interest among Chinese scholars to approach this phenomenon systematically. Thus among a large reservoir of literature on explicitation in translation, the works and papers dedicated to the Chinese-English translations are far and few between. Worryingly, the current researches (e.g. Cai Peishan,2007) restricted their scope almost exclusively to the lexical level, leaving diversified explicitating shifts untouched. Explicitation, as emphasized by Klaudy and Karoly (2005), serves in translation studies as a cover term for a raft of distinct reformulation operations. Klaudy (1993) distinguished four distinct types of explicitation:obligatory explicitation, dictated by language-specific differences; optional explicitation, necessitated by the discrepancies in text-building strategies and stylistic preferences between SL and TL; pragmatic explicitation, employed in light of cultural differences between SL and TL communities; and finally, translation-inherent explicitation, attributable to the nature of the translation process itself. Inspired and encouraged by previous studies on this phenomenon and Klaudy's typology in particular, the author of this paper attempts an systematic investigation of explicitation in the English translations of Chinese Classical Novel Hong Lou Meng, with randomly selected Chapter Five and its four English versions (Joly, H. B., 1892-3; Yang, H. Y.& Yang, G,1978-80; Hawkes, D.& Minford, J.,1973-86; Bonsall, B.S.,2004) as a case study.The current study partly adopts a corpus-based approach to test certain pre-specified measurements. The four English translated texts are tagged in accordance with different types of explicitating shifts. WordSmith Tool and Readability Analyzer are used in the present study to generate objective data for comparative analysis. With a qualitative and quantitative combined approach, the current study aims to identify and categorize different types of explicitation in four translations, to explore their similarities and differences, to testify the validity of explicitation hypothesis, and to investigate the motivations, if any, underlying the translator's explicitation strategies.The results of our study reveal a general tendency towards explicitation in all four English translations, and thus confirm our prediction of explicitation as a recurrent feature in English translations of classical Chinese novels. Based on our explicitation model, our quantitative analysis perceived the uneven distribution of explicitation among different translations. It is suggested that linguistic contrast, translators' individual preference, social and cultural lacunae all go into shaping the varied explicitness degree of different translations.It is our hope that the study will help to address limitations of imbalance in the current explicitation research by producing more empirical evidence. It is also our belief that by combining a corpus-based approach with a traditional qualitative analysis, the study will help offset the deficiency of speculation and intuition involved in the predominant prescriptivism in translation studies and draw scholars'attentions to the latent, if not often-ignored regularities of translational behavior.