A Quantitative Investigation Into Explicitation In E-C Translation

Explicitation was proposed in1958by Vinay and Darbelnet as “the process ofintroducing information into the target language which is present only implicitly inthe source language, but which can be derived from the context or the situation”. Inthe following years, this translation phenomenon has attracted great attention fromWestern translators. However, it has not caught Chinese scholars’ eyes until1999,which explains why there have been limited researches on it concerning Chinesetexts. The researches almost unanimously adopted the qualitative method, and theresults, at least to a certain degree, lack both objectivity and reliability. And in thosefew quantitative researches, the quality of translation is regarded as being directlydetermined by the number of explicitations. What’s more, there are no reliableprinciples to make judgments about the quality of explicitation.Against the above background, this research makes a comparative study, on thebasis of relevant theories, between two Chinese translated versions of Vanity Fair,with a method combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Twoprinciples to identify types of explicitation and levels of explicitation are formed onthe basis of Klaudy’s classification of explicitation and Nida’s notion of maximallevel and minimal level of equivalence. On the basis of the two principles, asystematic investigation is made into all explicitations in the first30chapters of thetwo Chinese versions: the numbers are counted of each type and each level ofexplicitation, the translation techniques are explored under the strategy ofexplicitation, and the relationship between translation quality and the quality ofexplicitation are explored.The results of this research reveal that there are a great number of explicitationsin both Chinese versions; however, they are distributed unevenly in everyclassification and every level of explicitation in the two versions, which means thequality of explicitations in them is different (For example, the amount ofexplicitations reaching+1level in Yang’s version accounts for60%, while it is37%in Rong’s version. Namely quality of explicitation in Yang’s version is higher thanthat in Rong’s version). It is discovered that there is relationship between quality oftranslation and quality of explicitation: the higher the quality of explicitation is, thehigher the quality of translation is. Another finding is that, to realize explicitation,both translators employ similar translation techniques like addition, conversion,division, and repetition. The Functional Equivalence Theory is for the first time employed as a principleto evaluate quality of explicitation. It is expected to supply a new angle for the laterresearchers to study quality of explicitation and even quality of translation. It issupposed to be able to provide some insights both to translators and translationtheorists, and the efforts made on the quantitative study of explicitation may be usedas a resource of methodology to achieve greater objectivity in further researches onexplicitation.