A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation In English To Chinese Subtitle Translation

Explicitation,one of the translation universals,has attracted sustained attention in contemporary corpus-based translation studies.However,most studies emphasize on Indo-European languages with little research which explores E-C translation,especially E-C documentary subtitle translation.Therefore,the present thesis,taking The Ascent of Money as a case,aims to carry out a comparative study on explicitation.This research aims to 1)investigate what forms of explicitation exist in documentary subtitle translation;2)examine the degree of explicitness in translated and non-translated Chinese subtitles;3)explore factors influencing explicitation and translation techniques adopted by translator.Firstly,both inter-language comparison and intra-language comparison will be conducted from the perspectives of word number,lexical density,connectives,which will be discussed based on quantitative analysis of statistical calculation of data extracted from the self-built parallel and comparable corpora.Then this thesis carries out a qualitative analysis to investigate the factors influencing explicitation and translation techniques.The results show that compared with original English subtitles,the translated Chinese subtitles show a conspicuous tendency of explicitation in terms of word number,lexical density and connectives.Secondly,as for intra-language comparison,the degree of explicitation in translated subtitle is higher than that in non-translated subtitles in general.Thirdly,there are four factors influencing explicitation in subtitle translation,namely,language system factor,textual factor,receptor factor as well as translator.In addition,substitution,addition,and reconstruction are employed by translator to explicate the subtitles.The results of current thesis can provide a reference for the translators and practitioners to improve the quality of the E-C documentary subtitle translation.