Explicitation In The Translation Of Informative Texts:A Report On Translating A History Of Ancient Near East(Excerpt)

The report is based on the E-C translation of the book A History of Ancient Near East.The book,written by Marc Van De Mieroop,the professor of History at Columbia University,incorporates the latest scholarly research and presents a comprehensive overview of the multicultural civilizations of the ancient Near East.The author reflects on the whole translation process,concludes translation methods,and provides some suggestions via composing the report.The source text is an informative text in accordance with the text typology theory.The texts can be classified into three types: the informative text,the expressive text and the operative text.As for the informative text,with the character of strong and clear logic,it lays out information,events,ideas,knowledge and opinions and stresses on the content more than the form.The translation strategy adopted is to use “plain prose” language without any redundancy so as to transfer the equivalent concept and information in the source text as well as explicitation when it is required.Faced with translation difficulties during the translation process,the author adopts explicitation as the strategy to translate the source text.The application of explicitation in this translation includes four specific methods: specification of equivocal nouns,annotation of proper nouns,contextual amplification and reorganization of sentence order.As for specification,it is the way to explicate the meanings of equivocal nouns so as to transfer the information of the source text equivalently to the target readers.As far as annotation,it gives background to readers so as to help them to understand the text.In terms of contextual amplification,it explicates the grammatical meaning by adding grammatical markers and the logic of sentences by adding conjunctions.Reorganization of the sentence order also explicates the logic of sentences.