On Explicitation And Implicitation In English Versions Of Border Town From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Explicitation and Implicitation phenonmena are inevitable in the translation process. Adopting of explicitation and implicitation appropriately contributes to expressing the original author’s communicative intention for translators. Based on the relevance theory, this study chooses the two classical versions of the Chinese novel as the cases, The Border Town by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi in 1982 and Border Town by Jeffrey C.Kinkley in 2009 to explore the explicitation and implicitation in two different versions, and further illustrate the reasons why explicitation and implicitation occur and the effects of translation in the target language context.This thesis is divided into six chapters: chapter one is the introduction, including the background, purpose and significance; chapter two is literature review which explores the current research about the Border Town’s English translation versions and related researches on explicitation and implicitation. Chapter three applies the theoretical framework which illustrates the main points of the relevance theory and the relevance translation theory as well as the definitions and types of explicitation and implicitation. According to the category of the explicitation which was advanced by Klaudy, explicitation data in this thesis can be divided into obligatory explicitation, optional explicitation and pragmatic explicitation. Based on the classification on encoding meaning of Blakemore, the implicitation data in this thesis consists of conceptual meaning and procedural meaning. Chapter four focuses on the research design, which involves two research questions, research methods and methods of collecting and analyzing data. Chapter five discusses the features of distribution of the explicitation and implicitation in different versions and explores the reason why explicitation and implicitation occur. And chapter six mainly consists of the conclusion and the limitations, which completely further states function of explicitation and implicitation in the translation of Chinese folk novels.Some conclusions have been drawn as follows: First of all, there are no distinctive features between two versions, while some commonality can be discovered, that is explicitation is more largely used in the two versions than implicitation. As the translators want to be faithful to SL, they have responsibility to explicate the implicit information in the SL to gain the optimal relevance between SL author’s communicative intention and TL readers’ expectation in order to give a complete understanding of Border Town. In addition, the translators respectively adopt obligatory, optional and pragmatic explicitation in order to cater language habits of readers and to make intention of Border Town be cognized by readers, which provide a way to for readers to get the optimal relevance and the best context between SL and TL so as to realize communicative intention successfully; While in the ostensive –inferential process it is impossible for translator to transmit all those meaning hidden in the SL. Translators apply two kinds of implicitation to express the communicative intention of Border Town, which gives Border Town much poetic effect.