Explicitation In The English Translation Of Traditional Chinese Science Classics

Recording much knowledge of science and technology in ancient China,Chinese sci-tech classics are well worth exploring in the context of China's “Go Global” strategy and “The Belt and Road Initiative”.This study,based on John Perry's Theory of Unarticulated Constituents,sets out to investigate explicitation in E-TU Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun's English translation of Tiangong Kaiwu that has a wide readership,with a special focus on its logical connectives and the information added by the translators in the brackets.Explicitation and unarticulated constituents have strong relationship.In the original texts,some hidden information could be easily understood by their target readers,but such implication might impede the understanding of the readers of translation versions.Therefore,explicitation of such unarticulated constituents is necessary.In terms of the types of explicitation,the most systematic classification was made by the Hungarian scholar Klaudy,who divided explicitation into obligatory explicitation,optional explicitation,pragmatic explicitation and translation-inherent explicitation.This study builds a small-scale Chinese-English parallel corpus of the translated text of Tiangong Kaiwu under the Theory of Unarticulated Constituents.As to the logical connectives,a corpus-based quantitative analysis is made with such tools as WordSmith Tools,and CUC_ParaConc.As to the information added in the brackets,a qualitative analysis is made of the techniques of explicitation.Based on Klaudy's model and with reference to the techniques of explicitation by some foreign scholars,this study builds the model for explicitation in the translated text.The model reveals Klaudy's four types of explicitation and the techniques of realizing each type of explicitation.The theory of unarticulated constituents is used to explain the rationality of the phenomenon of explicitation,and three principles of explicitation has been concluded,which are principle of syntactic integrity,principle of semantic clarity and principle of recontextualization.