On Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation

As a strategy of resolving ambiguity,improving the cohension and coherence of the source language text and adding linguistic and extra-linguistic information,explicitation strategy is frequently employed in English-to-Chinese translation to make the information in the translated text much clearer and more explicit than in the SLT due to the differences in semantic,syntactic,stylistic and textual structure and in culture between English and Chinese.The thesis tries to examine the explicitation strategies the translator can adopt in English-Chinese translation based on the translation of the first chapter of Shades of Indignation:Political Scandals in France,Past and Present by Professor Paul Jankowski.The selected chapter examines how the crime of treason became the greatest transgression in French history and how it became obsolete to the point of providing no stuff of scandal in modern France.The pronouns,long and complex sentences,indirect expressions,and large quantities of historical events,characters and place names in the SLT cause difficulties in understanding and translating.Explicitation strategies are required to improve the readability of the translation for the target reader.Klaudy's typology of explicitation is used as the analytical framework to identify and categorize the explicitation strategies in the translation.Klaudy classifies explicitation into four types,namely obligatory explicitations,optional explicitations,pragmatic explicitations,and translation-inherent explicitation.As translation-inherent explicitation is caused by the nature of the translation process itself and no typical example of obligatory explicitations is detected in the translation,this thesis focuses on optional explicitations and pragmatic explicitations.Through the analysis of the translation practice,this author proposes six explicitation strategies in English-Chinese translation.Optional explicitations include lexical repetition,adding connectives,restructuring sentences and filling elliptical structures.Pragmatic explicitations include adding footnotes and adding notes within text.