Explicitation Strategy In The Chinese-English Translation Of Business Biographies

The explicitation strategy,originally proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet in 1958,refers to a translation method that expresses the implicit or ambiguous information in the original text in a clearer,more logical and readable way.This report presents a case study on the English translation of Chapter One and Chapter Two of the book,The Legend of Tencent 1998-2016:the Evolution of a Chinese Internet Giant.The report summarizes several explicitation techniques used in the Chinese-English translation of business biographies based on related literature as well as the author’s own practice,aiming to provide some inspiration and enlightenment for the translation of similar texts.The book selected for this report is written by Wu Xiaobo,a well-known Chinese financial writer,and is officially authorized by Tencent.It is of certain significance for the outside world to understand the Chinese Internet giant and the country’s Internet economy.In this book,the author quotes extensively,from ancient times to the modern time and from China to foreign countries,covering various fields,and using numerous words,sentence patterns and expressions with Chinese characteristics and historical connotation.However,since the language system,cultural background,life experience and thinking pattern of the translation text readers are not consistent with those of the source text author,the former may be confused in reading and understanding the text.In view of different difficulties,what specific explicitation techniques could be adopted to help target text readers understand the original text more clearly is the starting point of this translation practice.Based on the case study,this report draws the following conclusion:At the lexical level,the translation of metaphors,Chinese culture-loaded words,idioms,proper nouns,professional terms and classical Chinese in business biographies could be made more explicit through the techniques of in-text addition,extra-text annotation and paraphrase.At the syntactic level,techniques such as segmentation,restructuring and conversion of sentence patterns could be utilized.Finally,for the sake of cohesion and coherence in terms of discourse,translators could try to add conjunctions or specify references so as to make sentences with unclear logical connections,vague or ambiguous references clearer,more understandable and acceptable.