On Explicitiation In English-Chinese Translation

Explicitation is the process of presenting information to the target text which is present only implicitly in the source text, but can be derived from the context. Since there are various terms and concepts which are unfamiliar to the common people in social sciences literature, the application of explicitation in the translation of such literature would make them more understandable. As a result, such literature can be accepted by more ordinary people.This paper discusses the strategies of explicitation from two aspects by comparing the original text (in English) and target text (in Chinese) of the sixth chapter in Shifting:The Double Lives of Black Women in America written by Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden. These strategies can be categorized into lexical explicitation, including adding annotations, repetition, specification, replacement, adding words to complete the phrase and adding words to show the tense, and syntactic explicitation, including reorganizing sentences, syntactic expansion and adding conjunctions.It is concluded that because of the differences of culture, grammar and idiomatic expressions, translators tend to use explicitation strategies in various ways. Target texts are usually easier to understand and thus longer in length than original texts. The decision whether to adopt explicitation should be determined by the text type and target readers. However, translation is a subjective process, so the degree of explicitation of different target texts by different translators may vary.