A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation In English Translation Of The Maritime Code

Corpus-based translation studies, as a new trend in translationstudies, has been more and more popular among scholars, on the basis ofwhich the so-called translation universals are explored and verified. Thispaper focuses on explicitation, one of the translation universals based ona small parallel corpus. The text translation of the Maritime Code is topublicize the China’s fundamental rules and clarify westerners’perception about China. Qualified translations can create an organizedpublic environment for nation development, and strengthen cooperationand communication with other nations all over the world.This study investigates the quantity and frequency of explicitationon word number, standard type/token ratio (STTR), mean sentence length,conjunctions and prepositions in a testing situation. It devotes to describethe phenomena of explicitation in translation and find out the factorscontributing to the phenomena of explicitation.The quantity of explicitation in translating is collected andcalculated by computer software AntConc: a tool for data retrieval andanalysis. Compared with the source text, the lexical density of the targettext is lower, so is the standard type/token ratio. This indicates thevocabularies in target text are less diverse and poor, and the lemma isfewer. According to Wang Kefei’s translation words proportion,compared with the source text, the word number in the target text increases markedly, and it has the explicitation characteristics. However,there is no obvious difference between the mean sentence length ofsource text and mean sentence length of target text. In another words,explicitation does not exist in the mean sentence length of target text. Inaddition, the frequencies of conjunction and preposition in the target textare higher than those in the source text, which presents the explicitationphenomenon. The data reveals that explicitation exists apparently in theprocess of translating. Due to different features of the two languages,English is strict in sentence structure with complete components. Thusmore limits will be put into English text so as to present its rigorousnesswhen expressing concepts. On the other hand, Chinese is concise insentence structure. This difference reflects another function of translationexplicitation. On this score, the semantic relation can be expressed moreaccurately, information implied in the source text can be represented andthe target text can be translated in accordance with the grammar norms oftarget language.The findings generated from this study might affect translation in thefollowing facets: the result of the present study provides the evidence ofexistence of explicitation hypothesis. Nevertheless, translators can adoptexplicitation when it is necessary on the basis of the aim of translatorsand the demands from target readers. Different languages have their ownlinguistic features, which determine the discrepancy in the Maritime Code in different languages. Translators should guarantee an objective andauthentic content as well as linguistic form in accordance with discoursefeature of target language. It is hoped that the observations of the researchwill provide a reference for the study, teaching and practice of businesstext translation to improve the quality of business text translation.