A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation In E-C Translation Of Children’s Literature

Children’s literature created and produced for children in particular is of great importance inthat they are influential to the development of children’s reading comprehension ability and theiracquisition of mother tongue. In consideration of children’s reading ability and their receptivity,the language of children’s literature is supposed to be simple, vivid and logically organized.Translated Chinese children’s literary works take a large proportion in children’s literaturemarket and thus studies on children’s literature translation is worthy of great concern. Comparedwith the abundant researches on translation of children’s literature abroad, China still lags behindin its early stage which focuses mainly on translation techniques, strategies and principles whilethe translational language has seldom been researched.In line with the trend of international studies, this research employs the methods of corpuslinguistics, adopting a small-scale self-built children’s literature corpus consisting of PCECCL(Parallel Corpus of English-Chinese Children’s Literature) and OCCLC (Originally-createdChinese Children’s Literature Corpus). This study is launched both in a monolingual comparablemodal and bilingual parallel modal. Comparison is also made between different translatedversions of the same original. By analyzing the underlying causes of explicitation, this researchis expected to shed light upon children’s literature translation practice.In contrast with inexistence of distinct explicitation in other language pairs of children’sliterature translation according to previous research, it is found in the present research that thereare considerable instances of explicitaion in E-C translation of children’s literature. Firstly,influenced by English originals, Chinese translation adopts more connectives than Chineseoriginals, which shows the tendency of intra-language explicitation. Further retrieval reveals thatexplicating and adding of connectives results in inter-language explicitation. Secondly,explicitation of ideational meaning of nouns and adjectives usually happens in translation ofsuperordinate nouns and adjectives. They are translated into their subordinates with concretemeaning according to the context. Lastly, explicitation of emotional meaning is commonlyrealized through using of modal particles and modal adverbs. Though there seems to be no moremodal particles or modal adverbs in translated Chinese children’s literature than innon-translated works, more modal particles and less modal adverbs are used in children’sliterature (both translated and non-translated) than in general literature. Hence one can see thattranslated children’s literary works generally inherit the fine tradition of colloquialism andsimplification of Chinese originals in language use.The underlying cause of explicitation is a combination of language differences andtranslator’s subjectivity. As far as the translation quality is concerned, explicitation of ideational meaning and emotional meaning is mostly advised for it contributes to children’s understandingof the connotative meaning of the literary works and is also good for their acquisition of mothertongue. In terms of explicitation of logical relation, appropriate use of connectives can clarify thelogical relation between sentences and clauses and thus help children readers appreciate the workwithout difficulty or confusion, while overuse of connectives resulting from the source languageinfluence deviates from Chinese norms, which might impose extra load on children’scomprehension. Therefore, we can draw the conclusion that appropriate explicitation can helpchildren understand translated literary works better while explicitation resulting in deviationfrom Chinese norms should be avoided in order not to exert negative impact on children’sreading or acquisition of mother tongue.