Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation Of The Historical Text

The 1619 Project:A New Origin Story is an extended version of the New York Times Project 1619 series.The book tells the history of the United States since 161 9,puts slavery and its continuous influence at the center of the national narrative,and reshapes people’s understanding of the history of the United States.Reading this book will help Chinese readers understand slavery and American history.The first chapter of the book was selected for translation.As the book contains a large amount of information related to American culture and historical background,which makes it difficult for Chinese readers to understand,the translator needs to clarify it.This report will discuss the classification and techniques of explicitation in translation.This report proposes an analytical framework based on Munday’s classification by combining the theories of Vinay and Darbelnet.First of all,Munday’s textual clearness corresponds to the clearness of the cohesive devices of (?)veras,and this report will retain this level of clearness.Secondly,pragmatic and semantic clarity mostly act on the lexical level,which also echoes the lexical clarity of Vinay and Darbelnet.Thirdly,Munday’s interpretation of grammatical clarity is not applicable to English-Chinese translation.This report draws on the clarity of syntactic structure in Vinay and Darbelnet models.Therefore,this report will analyze and clarify from three aspects:vocabulary,sentence and cohesive devices.This classification is less repetitive and more detailed.This report finds that the explicitation techniques can be divided according to this classification.At the lexical level,explicitation techniques include adding footnotes,explaning words within text,etc;At the syntactic level,explicitation techniques include reorganizing sentences,changing passive voice into active,etc;At the discoursal level,means of explicitation include adding conjunctions and specifying references and lexical cohesion,etc.