Characteristics And Motivations Of Explicitation In Students' C-E Translation

With the emergence of descriptive paradigm and the introduction of corpus tools,explicitation has been a topic which receives continuous attention in Translation Studies.Among these studies,fruitful research findings are gained in the aspects of conjunction and personal pronoun as subject.However,previous studies are mainly based on monolingual comparable corpus instead of parallel corpus.While many studies focus on the macro-level frequency analysis of some retrieval items,the micro-level translation conversion is usually neglected.Moreover,previous studies rarely investigate explicitation in students? translation under testing environment.Aiming to investigate characteristics and motivations of explicitation,the present thesis has conducted a study based on 1123 C-E literary translated texts by junior and senior English major students during examination.The data is collected in Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners.Research questions formulated are as follows: 1)On the macro level,is there a tendency of explicitation through the use of reference and conjunction in students? C-E translated texts? If the answer is yes,what is the tendency? 2)On the micro level,how is explicitation manifested in the use of reference and conjunction? 3)In students? translated texts,why does explicitation in the use of reference and conjunction show the characteristics mentioned in Questions One and Two?This thesis uses the parallel corpus tool Paraconc1.0 to retrieve reference and conjunction words in students? translated texts.Using ST-TT comparison method,occurrences of explicitation are counted in dimensions of specification and addition.Besides,typical examples are analyzed.The research findings are as follows.On the macro level,tendency of explicitation is strongest in the use of personal reference,followed by the use of conjunction,and weakest in the use of demonstrative reference.On the micro level,explicitation in the use of reference is mainly manifested in supplemented null subject,added discourse marker,inserted appositive and demonstrative modifier,specified inanimate personal reference,etc.Explicitation in the use of conjunction is mainly manifested in enhanced rhetorical question,clearer parallelism expression and specified conjunctive adverb.Based on the above analysis,motivations of explicitation are identified in linguistic,cultural,narrative and translator aspects.In the linguistic aspect,explicitation is influenced by language difference,pragmatic difference,contextual influence and information density.In the cultural aspect,explicitation in influenced by different observations of the approbation maxim between Chinese and Western cultures.In the narrative aspect,explicitation is influenced by narrative perspective and change of topic.In the translator aspect,explicitation is influenced by cognitive processing,empathy,psychological distance and habitual usage in written language.