A Study Of Explicitation In E-C Fictional Translation As Exemplified By Li Wenjun’schinese Translation Of Runaway

Taking Runaway written by Alice Munro and its Chinese Translation by Li Wenjun as the case, this thesis inclines to study the tendency of explicitation in fictional translation, aiming at analyzing systematically the manifestations of explicitation and its specific strategies and then contributing to the research on explicitation in fictional translation.Explicitation refers to the phenomenon which frequently leads to the target text with a marked rise in the level of explicitness when compared to source texts and to original texts in general. The application of explicitation strategies aims to render the original information in a more explicit way in the translated text, so as to meet the readers’ expectation and increase the readability of the translation. Since Mona Baker(2000) brought about the “translation universal features hypotheses”, explicitation, as one of the universal features, has attracted attention from the scholars both home and abroad. However, there is still divergence of views on its definition, categorization and motivations.By far, corpora have been widely applied into the research on explicitation, but since explicitation is by no means definite in terms of concept no matter when it denotes translation process or the expected effects, the traditional comparative research approach turns to be the only way to observe the various microphenomenon of explicitation in translations. Therefore, in this study, the original and translated texts are collected and then compared and analyzed manually in terms of the explicitation-related phenomenon. It is found that in the Chinese translation of Runaway, explicitation takes place in a high frequency and it is inevitable. There are four major categories of explicitation appearing in the Chinese version, which are semantic, pragmatic, textual and mood explicitation. Meanwhile, to realize good effects of explicitation and ensure the quality of the translation, the translator adopts mainly five explictation strategies, which are addition, paraphrase, specification, repetition and annotation.Four motivations serve to influence the tendency and the extent of explicitation in the translation of Runaway, which are the linguistic differences, textual constraints, socio-cultural background, and the translator’s preference. The four motivations weigh differently on their influences on the explicitation, linguistic ones being the root cause of explicitation and the translator’s preference influencing the extent of explicitation. It is found that appropriate explicitation is conducive to the readability and acceptability of the translated text and the translator should take into consideration all the motivations for explicitation and adopt proper translation strategies in the process of translation to improve the quality of the fictional translation.