A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation In Chinese Translated Fiction

Since Vinay and Darbelnet first put forward the concept of explicitation in 1950 s, many scholars on translation have made various researches at all levels and achieved great development on both theoretical and empirical study. In the meantime, there are still some unresolved problems remaining for further verified and explained, which lead to higher concern on explicitation of translation in recent years. Much attention is made to the translation explicitation on the Indo-European languages in initial studies, thus, some previous conclusions achieved by former scholars need to be further testified in non-Indo-European languages. Different translations of the same novel will be investigated, which could not only get rid of the limitations of monolingual corpus, but also clearly reveal whether the explicitation occurs because of the translation universals or translators? individual preference.Explicitation includes not only shifts of language cohesion, but also explicating shifts of meaning explicitation that means adding information explicitly to help target readers understand. In other words, implicit information of the original text is made explicit in the translated text so as to clarify meanings or express logical relationships more clearly in target texts.The thesis is designed to put forward additional evidence for the empirical verification of translation explicitation as one of translation universals. By use of the data processed by corpus tools from the parallel and comparable corpus perspectives, the thesis focuses on the fiction Vanity Fair(VF) and its three Chinese versions respectively translated by Yang Bi in 1957, Peng Changjiang in 2006, Rong Rude in 2011 and Chinese mandarin balanced corpus LCMC.According to Baker?s corpus-based theory on translation universals, this thesis will study the explicitation of Chinese translated fiction from both inter-lingual and intra-lingual aspects to do some qualitative studies as well as quantitative analysis. Then the thesis makes further investigation on different types of explicitations in three translated versions. At the end of the chapter, explicitation causes are explored from three aspects: causes inherent to translation process, causes of linguistic and cultural difference, together with causes of translator and readers? expectation.Through investigation, the study confirms the existence of explicitation which is universal among three translated versions, however, the degrees of explicitaiton varies from version to version. Yang?s version appears the least explicit in all aspects that have analyzed in this thesis. Apart from personal pronoun and kinship terms, Rong? version ranks the highest in all other respects in terms of explicitation and explicitness while Peng?s version mainly falls in the middle.