On The Adequacy Of Explicitation In Literary Translation

Explicitation is a translation strategy by which the information implied in thesource text (ST) is stated more explicitly in target text (TT). The purpose of usingthis strategy is to guarantee the coherence of the text and to increase readability. Foryears many scholars have been committing themselves to corpus-based empiricalstudies and trying to prove a universal existence of explicitation in all translationprocess. Based on the previous studies, this thesis endeavors to evaluate the qualityof explicitation with the aim of exploring the questions of how the quality ofexplicitation may be evaluated and what relationships there are between theexplicitation strategy and translation quality.The World of English as the object of this study is a collection of literarytranslation as well as the first English-Chinese bilingual magazine issued in China.Also it has been enjoying reputations among readers and counterparts.200articlesare collected in the current study from the Wenyuan Column of this magazine, whichcover literary works of fiction, essay and prose. Besides, as a collection of manytranslators’ work, the objectivity of the study can be guaranteed to some extent.This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods forevaluating the quality of explicitation. Despite the fact that a shared standard for theevaluation is still in controversy, Reiss presents her Adequacy Theory and holds thatthe quality of literary translation should be evaluated from both semantic andaesthetic dimensions. As it is stated in her theory of text typology, literary translationas a kind of expressive text should witness its adequacy in terms of conveyingmeaning and beauty. The qualitative study of the thesis is also conducted from thetwo aspects. In order to make the qualitative study on the two factors of adequacymore systematic, this thesis tentatively proposes four types of meaning explicitationbased on Leech’s seven types of meaning and Wu Jianping’s five types of meaning;and five types of explicitation concerning aesthetic elements based on Mao Rongguiand Liu Miqing’s classification of the beauty of Chinese language. As far as thequantitative study is concerned, two scales are built to improve the scientificity of thestudy. The scales contain five rates of the necessity of meaning explicitation andaesthetic effect of explicitation concerning aesthetic elements referring to the designof Likert Scale. Each of the five rates is assigned a numerical score and all the fivescores are arithmetic. As a result, it is possible to evaluate the quality of explicitationby summing all the scores. The results of the study are as follows:One is that the quality of explicitation can be evaluated through the followingways: Qualitatively speaking, firstly, each of all the instances of explicitation shouldbe attributed to the relative4types of meaning explicitation and5types ofexplicitation concerning aesthetic elements. After that, the degrees of the necessity ofmeaning explicitation and the scales of the aesthetic effect of explicitation are judgedand analysed in the next step. Quantitatively speaking, the quality of explicitation isshown by the total score of the explicitation which is the final score by summing fiverates of the necessity of meaning explicitation and aesthetic effect of explicitationconcerning aesthetic elements; the other result is that it is not the frequency but thequality of explicitation, which is determined by the explicitation of both meaning andits aesthetic effect working together, that influences the translation quality of a targettext.