A Corpus-Based Study Of Explicitation In Hawkes’ S Translation Of Hong Lou Meng

The translation versions of Chinese novels, the bridge and carrier of communication between Chinese and western culture, play a crucial role in promoting Chinese culture to the world. In view of Western readers’ comprehension and acceptance of Chinese classical novels,translational language is supposed to be vivid and direct, and the images of the characters are supposed to be clear in the translation of Chinese novels. As the absolute protagonists of Hong Lou Meng, the images of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu have gone global and are known to the world due to the translation versions of various languages. The study on the translation of Hong Lou Meng will shed light on the translation of other Chinese novels. At present, the corpus-based explicitation study focuses mainly on English-Chinese translation, and that of Chinese-English translation is rarely seen.This study, following the trend of cultural “going global” and based on the self-built corpus of small size, explores the explicitation in Hawkes’ s translation of Hong Lou Meng by employing the research tools and methods in corpus linguistics. Interlingual and intralingual comparison will be conducted in this study. In other words, Hawkes’ s translation will be compared with the original text and Yang Hsien-yi’s translation, on which the study on Hawkes’ s translational language and the underlying reasons for explicitation will be based. This study is expected to be helpful to the translation practice of Chinese-English translation.Relative systemic studies on the explicitation of Hawkes’ s translation have not been carried out, but in the present research it is found that, Hawkes’ s translation of Hong Lou Meng displays the tendency of explicitation in terms of conceptual meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. First, by identifying the translation of Jia Baoyu’s image in Hawkes’ s translation, the study finds that the occurrences of “Bao-yu’s” and “said Bao-yu” are more frequent and another further finding is that Hawkes’ s use of nouns embodying characters behind “Bao-yu’s” is more frequent than that of the original text and the adverbials collocated with “said Bao-yu” are richer and more concrete. The conceptual meaning shows the tendency of interlingual explicitation.Second, Daiyu’s dialogues are taken as examples to analyze interpersonal meaning from the perspective of mood, modality and vocation. It is found that the number of declarative,interrogative and exclamatory, imperative sentences in Hawkes’ s translation is larger than that in the original text, and further analysis reveals that most of the sentence types are corresponding to the original text, and the rest results from the explicitation in the translating process; statistical analysis of modal verbs and modal adverbs shows that the number of them used by Hawkes is two times as many as that of the original text and Yang’s translation; Hawkes’ s appellation words convey deeper and more direct meanings on reflecting interpersonal distance, social status,psychological activities and communicative purposes. Third, when investigating the explicitation of textual meaning, the author analyzes the usage of connectives. Although the percentage of connectives in Hawkes’ s translation is a little bit lower than that of Yang’s and intralingual explicitation is not obvious, most conjunctive relations of the original text are explicated by Hawkes, which improves the cohesion of the translation. There are both intralingual and extralingual reasons for the phenomenon. The former is mainly about language differences, and the latter involves the factors such as the translator, readership and socio-cultural differences.Explicitation of conceptual meaning is helpful for western readers’ understanding of connotative meanings and characters in a more intuitive way. Explicitation of Interpersonal meaning manifests the interpersonal relationship and deepens readers’ understanding of the characters. Explicitation of logic relation can clarify the logic relation between sentences and clauses. Appropriate use of explicitation during translating is conductive to the reading and reception of the translated works of Chinese novels by western readers.