| Along with the enhancement of China’s comprehensive power, Chinese traditional culture has been increasingly introduced to foreign countries. Chinese classics, including poems, novels and dramas, as a necessary component of traditional culture, have been translated into different languages. According to previous studies, Chinese is a semantic language which is more likely to use paratactic structure, while English is regarded as a morphological language and always adopts hypotactic structure. This means that Chinese is implicit and English explicit. Chinese classic essays use classic Chinese which is much more implicit than modern Chinese. Therefore, during the process of Chinese-English translation, the implied meanings in source texts should be explicated for the purpose of conforming to English grammatical system and making the source texts more comprehensible. Explicitation, as a common phenomenon in translation, has drawn great attention in the field of linguistics. It is first noticed by Vinay and Darbelnet in 1958,which is followed by numerous relevant studies, but domestic studies come much later.They start at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. Until now, most of explicitation studies focus on novels, economic texts, political texts, scientific texts and academic texts. But few concentrate on Chinese classic essays and study explicitation phenomenon from the perspective of SFL. Hence, this study tries to explore explicitation of experiential meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning within the framework of SFL. The analysis is mainly qualitative supported by quantitative data. Their ways of explicitation and potential motivations are also discussed.The study results show that the three kinds of metafunctional meanings are explicated. As far as experiential meaning is concerned, relational process and material process are much more likely to be explicated than other process types. The former is mainly explicated through addition and the latter through explanation. Besides, the majority of explicated participants are personal pronouns, most of which function as subjects. They are mainly explicated through addition. When explicated participants are other elements, such as nouns and adjectives, explanation is more likely to be used.Moreover,most circumstantial elements are explicated through addition. Circumstances of Location are most frequently explicated which is followed by circumstances of Manner, and most of them are explicated by means of addition. What’s more, half of circumstances of Manner are explicated through explanation, which is followed by addition. Explanation is more likely to be used to explicate circumstance of Comparison and addition is always adopted to explicate circumstance of Quality. With regard to interpersonal meaning, person and tense are highly explicated in English versions. 1st person and 3rd person take up the highest percentage and personal pronouns are explicated more frequently than possessive pronouns. And the most prominent way of explicitation is addition. Furthermore, there is no Finite in Chinese, which leads to explicitation of tense by means of addition. As far as textual meaning is concerned,additive conjunctions are the most frequent ones to be explicated and all the conjunctions are made explicit by way of addition. Lastly,the thesis also explores motivations of explicitation. It is found that some explicated cases are motivated by typological differences while others are attributable to practical needs of translation. |
