Explicitation In Translational English-A Corpus-based Case Study Of Reformulation Markers

This paper investigates explicitation in translational English via a case study of reformulation markers. The study takes a composite approach of "monolingual comparable corpora" and "bilingual parallel corpora", and combines quantitative and qualitative analyses so as to provide elaborate descriptions and explanations for the use of reformulation markers in translational English and offer more insights into the explicitation hypothesis, or more generally translation universal hypotheses.The results based on two comparable corpora of native and translational English suggest that translational English makes substantially more frequent use of reformulation markers as compared with comparable native English, thus lending some support to the explicitation hypothesis. Moreover, considerable genre variations are found in the use of reformulation markers in native and translational English. The features observed in comparable corpora are reevaluated and tentatively explained on the basis of two parallel corpora of Chinese-English and French-English texts. The results show that a higher degree of explicitation of reformulation makers occurs in non-fiction than in fiction, and that a higher degree of explicitation is found in Chinese-English than in French-English translation in both fiction and non-fiction. The higher level of explicitation in non-fiction than in fiction can be explained by different conventions (or communicative goals) of different genres. The much higher explicitation degree in Chinese-English translation of fiction than in French-English translation of fiction can be reasonably attributed to cultural and linguistic remoteness between Chinese and English. Similarly, cross-linguistic differences between Chinese and English are also an important factor contributing to the higher explicitation degree in Chinese-English translation of non-fiction than in French-English translation of non-fiction. As can be seen, the degree of explicitation is conditioned by various factors, thus we should consider a variety of constraints in translation universal studies and provide elaborate descriptions and explanations for linguistic features of translational language, so as to better understand the nature of translational language as a "third code".