A Statistic Study Of Explicitation Of Two English Translations Of Mao Zedong’s Poems

In recent years, a corpus-based translation study has become a brand newresearch perspective. It contains many research aspects, among which translationaluniversals is the most prevailing research hotspot. Among the studies of translationaluniversals, more and more scholars have given their preference to explicitation. Theexplicitation phenomenon in translations has drawn a worldwide attention both athome and abroad. As a translation skill, explicitation was originally put forward byVinay&Darbelne. It means that “making the implicit information in the ST moreexplicit in the TT by the context”. Nowadays, the studies of explicitation are restrictedto Indo-European languages, and there are few empirical studies related toChinese-English translations. Having examined the genre-based translation study inrecent years, we are sorry to find that the studies of explicitation in English translatedpoems have been left far behind.So this paper selects Mao Zedong’s poems as a research text. Exemplified byMao Zedong’s poems and the two English translated versions, the present studyinvestigates the distribution, degree, difference and motivation of explicitation,through which we are informed of the characteristics of the two English translations,and makes up the shortages of the explicitation studies between Chinese-Englishpoem translations. Our research questions are as follows:1. Do the two English translated versions of Mao Zedong’s Poems show anytendencies towards explicitation? If yes, how are they reflect? Which one is moreexplicit? If not, what are the reasons?2. What are the reasons underlying the phenomenon of explicitation between thetwo translated versions? Which English translated version approximates to theoriginal text in terms of the language adopted?Based on a self-built parallel corpus, a monolingual corpus, WordSmith4.0andParaConc, this thesis aims at making a retrieval of several parameters in the originaltext and the translated texts from three aspects: lexical, syntactic, and textual levels. Different parameters show the different degree of explicitation. The major findingsare displayed as follows:At the lexical level, both Xu’s version and Barnstone’s version have morewords than the original text, so both of them show the tendency of explicitation.Thissignifies explicitation exist in the process of Chinese-English poetry translating.What’s more, Barnstone’s version is more explicit than Xu’s version. As for the partof high frequency words and the Cultural referents, explicitation occurs in both Xu’sversion and Barnstone’s version, Xu’s version is a little more explicit than Barnstone’sversion.At the syntactic level, the mean sentence length in Xu’s version is longer thanin Barnstone’s version. Longer sentence makes the meaning explicit and help thereaders gain a better understanding of Mao Zedong’s Poems. So Xu’s version is moreexplicit than Barnstone’s version. As for the use of the optional that, the twotranslations have no significant difference at this respect.At the textual level, the coordinators in Xu’s version are fewer than inBarnstone’s version. As a result, Xu’s version is less explicit than Barnstone’sversion.The subordinators in Barnstone’s version are fewer than in Xu’s version. Thisindicates that Xu’s version is more explicit than Barnstone’s version in terms ofsubordinators employed.It is acknowledged that explicitation is caused by linguistic factors, however, thiscorpus-based empirical study suggests that there are various reasons that can cause theoccurrence of explicitation, such as linguistic, social and cultural factors, as well astranslators’s preference, etc. Xu Yuanchong’s translation approximates to the originaltext in terms of the language adopted. Xu Yuanchong’s translation runs over with theclassical Chinese characteristic, which could help the readers to have a betterunderstanding of the original text. However, Barnstone’s translation tends to be morenatural and westernized.With research findings listed above, the present thesis indicates the followingsignificances: firstly, based on the corpus studies, this study combines poetrytranslations with popular translation theory. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods makes the research more objective. What’s more, this study canalso help to find Xu Yuanchong and Will Barnstone’s translation features of MaoZedong’s Poems, and to make a contribution to the translation of poetry. Secondly,this study verifies the occurrence of explicitation in the Chinese-English poetrytranslation, and provides evidences for explicitation hypothesis. Therefore it can helpthe translation beginners to get a deep understanding of explicitation, and also helpthem to employ the strategy of explicitation properly.