On The Application Of Explicitation Strategy In The Translation Of One Of Ours

A famous Chinese translator Wang Yizhu once said that since a target text usually contains additional explanatory elements, the translated work tends to be easier understood than the source text. Of course, such a conclusion is based on the condition that the quality of the target text is guaranteed. This addition of explanatory elements which can ease readers’understanding can be considered explicitation.As its name suggests, explicitation strategy can turn something vague and ambiguous into something clear and obvious. The earliest scholars who put forward "explicitation" were French scholars Vinay and Darbelnet, but they defined the concept in a somewhat narrow way. Since then, more and more scholars began to pay attention to explicitation. Explicitation is thus considered an effective strategy to tackle some tricky translation problems.Even in translating the novel One of Ours, I still find explicitation quite useful. For example, there are a lot of cultural items, like religious stories, book titles, place names and historical figures throughout the book. Most of them are new to Chinese readers, and some are even indiscernible without any indication. In order to help readers get the sentence meaning and the purpose of using those references, I have to dig out the connotation and explain the stories and names in detail. Besides, there are many literary expressions which bear an implicit and abstract meaning. If I follow the source text too closely or imitate the way the writer created it, it is very likely that an awkward and illogical target text would be produced. Thus, I have to resort to the explicitation strategy properly so that I can retell the story in an explicit way. Therefore, theories on explicitation will serve as the foundation of my thesis.All the problems discussed in this thesis have been divided into four categories: explicitation of cultural items, explicitation of implicit information, explicitation of people’s emotions and attitudes in dialogues and explicitation of literary vagueness. Among these four types, explicitation of people’s emotions and attitudes in dialogues and explicitation of literary vagueness are relatively new ones, since so far very few scholars have realized the need to emphasize the characters’feelings in dialogues through explicitation or built a bridge between explicitation and the vagueness of literary language, although there have been independent studies on these two. So in this thesis, I will try to bridge them together and add something new to the types of explicitation, the way to translate dialogues and the methods to solve the problem of literary vagueness. As for the research methods, textual analysis and case study have been adopted.