A Study On Explicitation Of Chinese Literary Allusions In Interpreting In Political Settings

Explicitation is referred to as a frequent cross-language phenomenon,or strategy,in translation or interpreting in which the intended meaning contained in the original text perceived by the translator or the interpreter is made more explicit in the target text.Ever since the term was introduced for the first time by the French scholars Vinay and Darbelnet in 1958,many had conducted research on this topic.However,most of the studies of explicitation focus on translation.Furthermore,the majority of the studies concern explicitation at the lexical and grammatical level,focusing on lexical units like modals,connectives,adverbs,pronouns,or multi-word units like phrases,lexical bundles,and even a whole sentence.Research concerning explicitation on a meaning basis is scarce.Based on the previous researches,this thesis aims to probe into the explicitation of literary allusions in interpreting under political settings by a descriptive method.It attempts to examine the characteristics,nature,and motivations behind the explicitation of this particular collection of culture-loaded words.In order to fulfill the research purposes,the author taps into a self-constructed paralleled corpus of Chinese government press conference during the “Two-session”,namely the NPC and the CPPCC press conference.The corpus covers conferences across a 12 years’ span from2009 to 2020.By studying the characteristics of explicitation manifested in the rendering of Chinese literary allusions,and also based on the previous researches on typology of explicitation,the author identified three categories of explicitation of Chinese literary allusions,i.e.contextual explicitation,cultural explicitation,and semantic explicitation.Furthermore,the author probed into the motivation of explicitation of Chinese literary allusions from the perspective of interpreting norms,guided by Descriptive Translation Studies.The thesis proposes that the explicitation of Chinese literary allusions is potentially motivated by norm of cohesion,norm of positive national image,and norm of explicitness in meaning.The finding of this thesis not only reinforces the descriptive studies in interpreting,but also studies concerning a less focused subject on Chinese literary allusion,which are germane to the spread of Chinese culture.In addition,by tapping into a number of representative cases of rendering Chinese literary allusions,the thesis provides some practical insights for the practice of interpreting.