On Explicitation In The Translation Of Informative Texts

This report summarizes the translation process of an excerpt from a political economics book,The Rise and Fall of Nations.This book,introducing ten factors affecting the rise and fall of nations in this world in plain language,is a quick guide to the global economy today and awarded “A Library Journal Best Book of 2016”,so it is worthwhile to provide its translation version for the Chinese readers.In this translation project,the author chooses Chapter One “People Matter” as the source text and completes its translation version carefully.Then the author reflects on the translation process by writing this report,trying to summarize the translation methods of informative texts on political economics and provide some suggestions for the translations of the similar texts.This book is a typical informative text.In light of the text typology theories put forward by Katherine Reiss,the informative texts,characterized by strong logic,are to represent events,information,knowledge and ideas in the source texts,and emphasize on the contents rather than the forms.Translators should use plainprose language to transfer the equivalent concepts and information in the source texts,and adopt expliciation when it is required.In view of it,this report mainly discusses the explicitation in the translation of informative texts.The author catagorizes the explicitation in the translation of informative texts into three aspects—explicitation in terms of lexical meaning,explicitation in terms of syntax logic and explicitation in terms of grammatical marker,to observe different aspects in the process of explicitation.Through this translation project,the author concludes three major findings on the explicitation in the translation of informative texts as follows: 1)In terms of the explicitation of lexical meaning,translators could mainly adopt the strategy of specification to explicate the meanings of equivocal common nouns and add annotations for the proper nouns,to accurately transfer the meanings in the source text;2)in terms of the explicitation of syntax logic,translators could add necessary conjunctions and reorganize sentence structure when necessary,to explicitly represent the logics of the source text;3)in term of the explicitation of grammatical markers,translators could add plural markers and tense markers for certain effects of expression,to completely transfer the grammatical information in the source text.