On The Application Of Explicitation Strategy In English-Chinese Translation

Explicitation means to turn something vague and ambiguous in meaning or structure into something clear and obvious.In 1958,French scholar Vinay and Darbelnet define explicitation in translation as to make explicit in the target language what is implicit but can be inferred from the source language.Since then many scholars have expanded the definition of explicitation through case studies and corpus-based studies.This thesis chooses Camille Paglia's book Glittering Images:A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars for case study.This book discusses works of visual art from ancient to modern times,analyzing two dozens of important art works that have transformed our world.It intends to help people who have no access to art understand art and teach them how to distinguish art from those visual data bombarding us.The book involves lots of historical,cultural and professional information,which poses great difficulties for readers who are from different cultures or unfamiliar with arts.Meanwhile,the author sometimes uses abstract and obscure words to express the idea of art,so readers may fail to understand the text without explicitation.Therefore,this thesis applies method of textual analysis to discuss strategies of explicitation used in the translation of this book.This thesis discusses strategies of explicitation employed in the process of translation in word level,coherence level and context level,and the context level is further divided into internal context and external context.Strategies discussed in this thesis include substitution of abstract information with concrete expressions,paraphrase,addition of conjunctions,structure reconstruction,addition of extra information and footnotes and leaving out the cultural expression..Though explicitation can help make the translation much easier to understand,translators still have to avoid over-explicitation.And different type of text have different criteria for explicitation.How much explicitation is suitable for each text type is an issue worthy of discussion...