A Study On The Explicitation Of Default Values In The English Translation Of Shi Ji

Shi Ji is an important literary property which studies the language of the Qin and Handynasties, as well as the history of the Chinese language. It records the three thousand years’cultural history from Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu of Han. It is also an art treasure ofChinese literature history and one of the greatest contribution our brilliant ancient culturemade to the world, which has a special significance as a link between the preceding and thefollowing. Sima Qian combined folk spoken language and ancient written language in acreative way, so the language in Shi Ji has its own features. The sentences are brief butmeaningful, containing ample Chinese ethnic culture. Besides, language is the carrier ofculture, undertaking the heavy responsibility of handing down the national culture. Thereforethere are lots of default values.Cognitive linguist Lakoff thinks there are countless slots in cognitive frame. And defaultvalues are the slots when there is no exact pragmatic information. In other words, althoughdefault values do not exist in the sentences they can be understood and accepted by thereaders under particular context. Since the concept of default value was introduced, it hasattracted scholars from near and far, but there are still not many documents or essays.Therefore, this paper will focus on default values, classify them into different groups, anddiscuss the translating methods used in the English translations, and explore the cognitiveprinciples behind it.Explicitation was first proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet. They defined it as “a stylistictechnique which consists of making explicit in the target language what remains implicit inthe source language because it is apparent from either the context or the situation”. In thetranslation between two languages, due to the difference of languages and cultures, the sourcelanguage feature and cultural background need the translator’s help to realize explicitation.Default values are the hidden information in the source text, which are not expressed bywords, but can be understood by source language readers according to their knowledge oflanguage and background culture. But in the translation process, to reach the goal ofcommunication, the default values in the source text must have explicitation applied by thetranslator’s mental analyzing work and translation methods so that they can be understood bytarget language readers.The chosen English version of Shi Ji is “Selections from Records of the Historian” wastranslated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. They are greatest translators among those whotranslated Chinese classics into English the earliest. And their version of Shi Ji is recognizedas an authoritative version because the translators effectively made large numbers of default values in the source text explicit, which improves the quality of the translation, makes thetarget language readers have a better understanding of the source text, and further promotesthe dissemination of the Chinese classic culture to the world. Thus, this paper will treatdefault values as the key point and study the methods of explicitation and the cognitiveprinciples, while hoping to make a contribution to the translation of Chinese classics.