Rethinking Explicitation From The Perspective Of Communicative Principle And Relevance Theory

Weicheng is crowned as one of the most influential contemporary works of literature in China.The novel has been translated into many languages and the English version is collected in the series of Penguin Classics.The work brought its author Qian Zhongshu unanimous fame at home and abroad.Researches on the English translation of Weicheng numbered considerably,yet the explicitation phenomena in the text were barely touched upon.The notion of 'explicitation' was introduced in the 1950s,and later on rose to one of the six translation universals as suggested by Baker.However,relevant studies were long trapped by the three problems:indefinite definition,limited research objects and the endless cycle of hypothesis confirmation or negation.New frameworks alone will not be able to solve the dilemma,but they can be applied to reflect on the perception of explicitation,and together with the examination of the subject in real context,they will be able to provide fresh insight for future studies.The current study aims to explore the specific operations of explicitation in a literary translation from Chinese into English,make categorization accordingly,and discuss the underlying explanations for the explicitation phenomena.The study after weighing the translation at the paratextual,textual and cultural dimension detected the complexity and diversity of explicitation operations.At the paratextual level,the means of explicitating were often additions,for instance,the attached notes,the explanatory addition for the title,and the translator introduction.At the textual level,the operations were categorized into two major camps:explicit to more explicit and implicit to explicit.The former camp includes the following techniques:specification of referents,lexical disambiguation,enrichment(both semantically and grammatically),adjustment of sentence order,paragraph segmentation,shift from passive to active voice,transformation from negative to affirmative forms,omission of repetition,explanatory additions,etc.The operations belonging to the other camp were rare in the target text;the study hence focused on the explictation of metaphor,personification and ironies,which were also infrequent in the English translation.The translators on such occasions often dispensed with these rhetorical devices and encoded only the connotative meaning of the source expression.Explicitation at the cultural level amounts to a specific scenario since it reflects de facto a shift from explicit to explicit due to changes of readership.Translators operations in this respect largely depended on the specific function of the cultural expressions concerned.Those used for fact narration were often transliterated with explanations or substituted with approximate target expressions,and as for the cultural expressions used for analogies only the connotative meaning behind was retained--the original image disappeared.The means of explicitation through the case analysis pointed to five general groups:substitution plus addition,substitution plus omission,substitution,addition,and omission.Specification and generalization can be bracketed into the first two groups respectively.The operation of omission demonstrates peculiarity since the source writer directly applied English and its Chinese translation in the text which caused unnecessary repetition for the target text.The study also discovered that besides linguistic differences and individual preferences translators interpretation of the characters in general,the specific content of the text,translators attitude towards the source text as well as concerns for literary styles all to an extent held sway in the choice of explicitating.Meanwhile,it also found that the explanation for a specific explicitation phenomenon was neither single nor definite which means the textual results of explicitation do not necessarily reflect the tendency to explicitate.