A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation Of Connectives In English To Chinese Business News Translation

The emergence of corpus-based translation studies has greatly promoted thestudy of Translation Universal, of which explicitation and implicitation havebecome the most studied ones. Blum-Kulka has (1986) proposed explicitationhypothesis, postulating an inclination of cohesive explicitness from SL to TL textsdisregarding the differences between the two textual and linguistic systems.The studies on explicitation have achieved a lot in the past two decades. Yet,reviewing extant research, the author finds that major achievements have longbeen confined to Indo-European languages. Relevant studies on Chinese texts arestill few and far between, especially for non-literary ones.As one category of grammatical cohesive devices, connectives reasonablybecome a natural perspective in conducting studies on explicitation hypothesis.This thesis aims at probing into the manifestations of adversative and causalconnective explicitation in E-C business news translation. By comparing theresults with the findings of the forerunners, the fundamental objective is to provethe explicitation hypothesis and make an explanation to the phenomenon ofexplicitation. The findings also provide implications for translation teaching andlearning.The author managed to build a parallel corpus which is composed of OLC(Original Language Corpus of English) and TLC (Target Language Corpus ofChinese) two corpora and a comparable corpus CCBC (Comparable Corpus ofBusiness Chinese). The three corpora have50484,49196and53287wordsrespectively. The self-built parallel corpus and comparable corpus are served fortwo types of analysis, namely, parallel corpus-based inter-language comparisonmodel and comparable corpus-based intra-language comparison model. Bycombining quantatitive study and qualitative study together, the author tries toreveal the manifestation of explicitation theory in E-C business news translation.In accordance with the statistics, the paper finds: 1. Inter-language study: By calculating the number of adversative and causalconnectives, the author finds that while translating from E-C, adversativeconnectives show a vague trend of explicitation and causal connectivesshow a prominent trend of explicitation, which justifies the inter-languageexplicitation proposed by Baker. By examining the type of conversion, theauthor finds that corresponding takes the largest part in the conversion ofadversative connectives while explicitation occupies the largest part in theconversion of causal connectives.2. Intra-language study: Intra-language explicitation is prominent for bothadversative and causal connectives in E-C translation，which justifiesBaker’s intra-language explicitation and Huang’s research result.3. After making an in-depth investigation, the author finds that moresyntactic explicitation appears in E-C translation than semanticexplicitation, especially for “虽然”,“但是”,“但”“因而”,“由于”,“所以”,“从而”and “因而”. Semantic explicitation is prominent for thetranslation of “and”,“for all”,“despite”,“all the same” and “then”.4. By conducting the contrastive study with Huang’s study, the author findsout that texts of different genres may demonstrate a different degree ofexplicitness. As for translated Chinese, non-literary ones especiallybusiness news are inclined to be more explicated with more frequent useof connectives to denote logical relations.