A Quantitative Study Of The Translation Strategies And The Explicitation And Implicitation Rates Of The Personal Pronoun“我们”in David Hawkes’s Translation Of Hong Lou Meng

The definitions,characteristics,and calculation methods of explicitation and implicitation have always been a relatively controversial subject in Descriptive Translation Studies.In the past,domestic researches mainly analysed the explicitation and implicitation of Personal Pronoun by comparing their overall word frequencies in the source text and target language text.However,translators often have to flexibly translate the personal pronouns based on different contexts in C-E translation.This is because firstly Chinese and English belong to different language families,and secondly Personal Pronoun has rich pragmatic variation.Therefore,the explicitation and implicitation of Personal Pronoun in translation should be discussed within specific contexts.This study introduced the syntactic function and semantic characteristic as criteria for classifying the two translational universals of Personal Pronoun—explicitation,implicitation.And it was proposed in this thesis to use the overall word frequency of certain personal pronoun in the source text as dividend to quantify its explicitation and implicitation rates.Utilizing the Hong Lou Meng C-E parallel aligned corpus,this thesis studied the first-person plural form in Chinese—“我们”（wo men,WE）and its translation,with a focus on the following questions:1.What were the translation strategies of“我们”in the first 80 chapters of Hong Lou Meng used by Hawkes and what was the word frequency and proportion of each strategy?2.What were the translation strategies of“我们”in the sampled 8 chapters of Hong Lou Meng used by Hawkes and what was the word frequency and proportion of each strategy?3.What were the real explicitation and implicitation rates of“我们”?4.What kind of error might occur when using the overall word frequency of“我们”in source text and that of we/us/our/ours in the target language text when quantifying its explicitation and implicitation rates?The research results showed that in the first 80 chapters of Hong Lou Meng,the proportions of Correspondence,Specification,Omission,Transformation and Addition translation of“我们”were respectively 76.4%,6.8%,12.4%,4.3%and383.5%,so the explicitation rate was 390.3%.Meanwhile,in the sampled chapters of Hong Lou Meng,the proportions of Correspondence,Specification,Omission,Transformation and Addition translation of“我们”were respectively 78.6%,8.6%,10.0%,2.9%and 238.6%.So the explicitation and implicitation rates of“我们”in sampled chapters were respectively 247.1%and 10.0%while the explicitation rate without manual tagging would only reached 202.9%with an error rate of almost 50%.In addition,from the micro perspective,there would be error in the proportions of some translation strategies,like Loose Correspondence.By manual tagging the personal pronouns,the thesis could help us to better understand the strategies used by Hawkes when translating Personal Pronoun.And it also provided more scientific definitions and operable quantifying methods for Descriptive Translation Studies.In addition,this thesis also tries to explain the above phenomena from the perspective of culture and language,and finds that the explicitation of Personal Pronoun in C-E translation is the result of the difference between two cultures and two language systems.