A Study On Explicitation In The Governance Of China ? From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

The Governance of China Volume 2 is a collection of several dozen speeches and writings by Xi Jinping,general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chinese president.To allow both foreign and domestic readers to know more about China's latest development and governance,Foreign Languages Press released the English version in October 2017.President Xi Jinping's speeches are loaded with references and rich culture elements,so in order to deliver the essence and style of the speeches across different culture,it's important for the translators to apply explicitation method.The English version has received worldwide attention and success,providing rich materials for translation study.This paper conducts a quantitative and qualitative study on the explicitation in The Governance of China Volume 2.In the light of Halliday's classification of the three meta-functions of language,the author categorizes the explicitation into three categories:explicitation of ideational function information,interpersonal function information and textual function information.This paper aims to probe into the explicitation employed by the translators,the strategies and motivations of explicitation in political text translation.Research shows that the differences between language and culture,text typology and the translators could motivate the translator to apply translation strategies such as using literal translation with annotation,explanatory translation,free translation and addition to achieve explication.Because of linguistic and socio-cultural differences,the translators need to add connectives or subjects to make the target text more structured after analyzing the logic of the source text.From the perspective of text typology,political texts mainly belong to informative texts with some features of expressive texts,so it requires the target texts to be concise and able to highlight the attitudes and values.As the main body of translation activities,translators play a decisive role in applying explicitation.The explicitation strategy chosen by the translators is also limited by the translators' analysis of the purpose of translation,the target readers and the translators'proficiency in translation.