The PACCEL-Based Study Of Explicitation In Translation

As a new trend in translation studies, corpus-based translation research has attracted more and more scholars'eyeballs. A case in point is explicitation study based on corpus in translation. However, there is hardly any attempt to conduct a study of the explicitation in the process of interpreting, let alone the comparative study on explicitation between interpreting and translating.This study investigates the quantity and frequency of explicitation on logical relationship conjunctions and personal pronouns in a testing situation. It seeks to describe the general description of explicitation in translation and interpreting and find out the motivations of the phenomenon.The material employed in the present study was from PACCEL. The sampled 190 cases were chosen from PACCEL-S, while other sampled 93 cases from PACCEL-W. The investigation was conducted from two aspects:on the one hand, the conceptual framework in this study was based on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) classification of cohesive devices. However, the present study focuses on only three aspects consisting of casual conjunctions, conditional conjunctions and adversative conjunctions due to the time and category limitation. On the other hand, taking the cultural differences between English and Chinese into consideration, explicitation on personal pronoun subjects has also been discussed in the study to support the result.The quantity of explicitation in interpreting and translating is collected by computer software ParaConc:a tool for data retrieval and analysis. Calculation and statistical analysis on the frequency of explicitation by SPSS 16.0 will be illustrated through figures and tables. Findings come out by the study may be summarized as follows:Firstly, according to the quantity of explicitation calculated by ParaConc in the course of interpreting and translating, it reveals that explicitation on logical relationship conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects existed apparently in both the course of interpreting and translating.Secondly, the descriptive statistics shows that the logical relationship conjunctions and personal pronoun subjects enjoy higher frequency of application of explicitation in interpreting than translating by the test-takers, reflecting the higher degree of explicitation in interpreting than in translating.Thirdly, as the cluster bar shown by SPSS 16.0, it demonstrates that the higher frequency of use of personal pronoun subjects in both interpreting and translating. Furthermore, the descriptive analysis indicates that no matter in interpreting or in translating, the overuse of personal pronoun subjects also leads to explicitation.The findings generated from this study may affect translation and interpretation in the following aspects:on the one hand, the result of the present study provides the evidence of existence of explicitation hypothesis. Therefore, interpreters and translators can adopt explicitation when necessary according to the aim of translators or interpreters and the requirements from readers/listeners. On the other hand, L2 teachers should help the learners' to master the flexible use of explicitation by fostering students'ability with more exercises, such as transformation of sentence pattern, the variety of collocations and so on.