| Previous studies of explicitation in the translation of personal pronouns were mainly confined to literary translation(Wang & Hu,2008;Huang,2008).This study adopts Blum-Kulka’s(1986)explicitation hypothesis to investigate the translation of personal pronouns in political texts,specifically,the Report on the Work of the Government(RWG)of China,its English translation,as well as the State of Union Address(SUA)of America.All the personal pronouns therein have been selected,calculated and compared both cross-linguistically(Chinese vs.English)and intralinguistically(translated English vs.original English).With the comparative analyses based on the theoretical framework,there are three major findings as follows: Firstly,the author counted the transferring types of personal pronouns in the translation,and found that “addition” and “explicating” are most frequently used.Thus,explicitation can be said to be in use in the process of translation.Secondly,the author compared to the frequency of every single personal pronoun in the source text and that in the target text,and found the frequencies of personal pronouns in the English-translated text are much higher than those in the original Chinese text.Therefore,the author comes to the conclusion that explicitation has been applied in the process of translation from Chinese to English.Lastly,the author compared to the frequency of every single personal pronoun in the translated English text and that in the non-translated English text,and found the frequencies of three personal pronouns,i.e.,“we/us” and “its”,in translated English text are higher than their counterparts in the original English text.Thus,those pronouns constitute the prominent cases that instantiate the explicitation technique. |
