Exploring Explicitation In The English Translation Of Science Fiction Trilogy Santi

The development of the Corpus-based Translation Studies witnessed the birth of the hypothesis of the Translation Universals.From then on,researchers from all over the world have begun to endeavor to prove whether these universals truly exist or not.Explicitation,as one of them,means that the translators would prefer to make the implications of the original text clear in the translation so that the target readers could understand what the author of the source language really wants to express.However,it may lack the power of the persuasiveness when considering the cultural identity of the translator himself,who would no longer be regarded as being“invisible”with the extensiveness and the thoroughness of the studies on translation.Instead,researchers begin to pay more attention to the influence of the translators' factors on their translation,which even leads to the research tendency of the translators' styles.Since in the process of translation,under the influence of the source language and culture,translators would choose different strategies to finish the job,which may cause deviation from the so-called translation universals.The creative point of this thesis is that it chooses the English translation of the Chinese science fiction trilogy Santi(????),viz.The 7Three-Body Problem and Death's End,as materials to explore explicitation.In 2015,the novel won the 73th Hugo Award for Best Novel.In 2017,the third section of the trilogy(Death's End)was also nominated for 2017 Hugo Awards and there is possibility that the writer might have another chance to be winner again.And these honor should be owed to its translator Ken Liu,a brilliant bilingual master,who introduced the English version of this masterpiece successfully into America by virtue of the flexible translation skills,facilitating the communication between China and America.This study explores the explicitation in the Ken Liu's translation from the perspective of lexicon,syntax and discourse to verify the existence of this translation universal.In terms of lexicon,this research explores the coined words and footnotes from the aspect of the inter-language comparison.On the syntactic level,both of the aspect markers and tense markers are calculated.In the aspect of the discourse,personal pronouns and conjunctions are obtained from the inner-language comparison.The results show that in the lexical aspect,both the coined words and footnotes show the explicitation,especially the meaning explicitation.In terms of the tense markers,there is not any evidence showing that the COTE is explicated in other tenses except the simple past tense and the past perfect tense.However,the explicitation of the aspect markers does not exist.In the discoursal aspect,neither of the personal pronouns and the conjunctions show the explicitation.The English translation of this novel only partly,but not completely,exhibits explicitation in lexicon,syntax and discourse.Therefore,explicitation,as one of the Translation Universals,still needs to be questioned.