On Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation

This paper is based on the translation project—Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire published by Oxford University Press.The book tells the history of European imperialist expansion in the late 19 th and 20 th centuries.The book belongs to non-literary text,which requires the information to be accurately translated;it is concerned with historical events,which means during translation process,there may involve difficulties such as insufficient background knowledge caused by contextual differences.Meanwhile,the differences between English and Chinese languages will also lead to ambiguity.This paper will apply the explicitation strategy to reduce ambiguity and achieve explicitation in English-Chinese translation.By analyzing translation examples,the translation methods will be summarized.Three steps will be conducted in this paper.First,through the translation project,the ambiguity in translation caused by differences between Chinese and English will be analyzed.Second,this paper will apply various translation methods to reduce ambiguity and achieve explicitation in English-Chinese translation.Third,an evaluation of the revised translation is conducted to check if the selected translation methods achieved explicitation.It is concluded that explicitation can be achieved by applying different translation methods.With the examples from Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire,this paper summarizes four types of explicitation in English-Chinese translation,namely,the explicitation of number,pronoun,logical relation and context.Translation methods are applied accordingly to achieve explicitation,such as addition of numerals,substitution of pronouns,addition of conjunctions and cultural information.Explicitation is the expression of the original information in a more explicit way.Translators should be aware of different types of explicitation and adopt a variety of translation methods flexibly to make the translation content more accurate and specific.