Explicitation And Implicitation In Political Text Translation

Political text translation is to publicize the nation’s fundamental policies and build westerners’positive perceptions about China. Qualified political text translations can create a friendly public environment for national development, and strengthen cooperation and communication with other nations. Explicitation, as a universal feature of translation, together with implicitation greatly facilitates the intelligibility of the translation, and is critical to a successful translation. Hence proper explicitation and implicitation in political text translation can better fulfill the task of worldwide publication. The previous researches on political text translation are limited to reflections upon personal translation experience and practice, which have indirectly referred to the explicitation and implicitation theories, but lack rigorous theoretical basis and empirical data support. And even researches on implicitation which is significant for a qualified translation have rarely been done.In view of the insufficiency of explicitation and implicitation theoretical research on the field of political text translation, this thesis aims to explore the application of explicitation and implicitation in political text translation. Premier Wen Jiabao’s Government Work Report 2010 and its translation, as the most influential, authoritative type and standard of political texts, is chosen as a case study and analyzed statistically and exhaustively. Firstly this thesis conducts an analysis on related researches on the definition and classification of, strategies for and factors affecting explicitation and implicitation, and the characteristics of political text translation serving as a theoretical basis, and then mainly researches specific characteristics of each type of explicitation and implicitation, and related translation strategies for explicitation and implicitation, based on which, the factors affecting explicitation and implicitation are investigated to provide implications on how to handle explicitation and implicitation properly to ensure the quality of political text translation.Major findings can be drawn from this research as follows:In the Report,explicitation takes far more frequencies than implicitation with a ratio of 6.6:1; moreover, 441 sentences out of a total of 554 sentences in the ST have been explicitated on 79.6%, and 126 sentences out of the total sentences in the ST have been implicitated on 22.7%. It validates that explicitation is a universal feature of translation and also indicates that explicitation is much more evident and a more proper consideration in translating political texts. Explicitation, compared with implicitation, scores more types on a total of 11 types, and the most frequent type is subject of action explicitation,followed in order by modality, conceptual, cultural, connectives, pragmatic, relation, sentential constituents ellipses, syntactic structure, pronoun, evaluative explicitation, the first three among which take 88.4% of the total number; while implicitation scores merely five types, and the top type of implicitation is conceptual implicitation, followed in rank by pronoun, evaluative, sentential constituents ellipses, syntactic structure implicitation. The total frequencies and number of types of implicitation are much less than explicitation, but more evenly distributed than the latter.In the Report, explicitation employs more strategies than implicitation while the distribution of strategies employed by implicitation is more varied than explicitation. On explicitation, the strategy of addition takes 92.34% of the total, and the rest strategies of paraphrase, elevation, substitution and repetition are not commonly employed. On implicitation, the strategy topping the list is deletion, closely followed by combination, substitution, and downgrading.This thesis concludes five factors, the language system’s difference, socio-cultural background, textual characteristics, receptor’s readability, and translator’s personal style, are affecting the meditation of explicitation and implicitation in political text translation. Translators should weigh all these factors, while not always all of them exert the same influence on explicitation and implicitation translation. In this Report, translators are primarily motivated by the language system differences which is relatively more obligatory than the rest four factors; and the cause of any case of explicitation and implicitation may be multi-folded, and several factors may interact with each other simultaneously to motivate some occurrence of either explicitation or implicitation.It is hoped that the observations of this research will provide a reference for the study, teaching and practice of political text translation to improve the quality of political text translation.