Explicitation In Translation From English Into Chinese

This translation report is based on the English-to-Chinese translation of a book containing medical information entitled State of the Heart:Exploring the History,Science and Future of Cardiac Disease(hereinafter,State of the Heart),which introduces the origin and treatments of cardiac disease by citing clinical cases and tracing historical records.The book contributes to popularizing knowledge of heart disease and helps to prevent and control it.During the translation process,the major difficulties encountered are ambiguous medical expressions,professional medical terms,Egyptian mythologies and historical events,metaphors,long and embedded sentences,vague references,etc.,which add to the translation’s implicitness.Explicitation theory is adopted as the guiding theory to overcome those difficulties and nine translation strategies are used on the lexical,sentential and textual levels to make the translation more explicit.As to the difficulties on the lexical level,ambiguous medical expressions are translated into specific medical terms with medical illustrations added to show the details.Egyptian mythologies,historical events and professional medical terms are specified in translation along with footnotes for an explanation.Moreover,metaphors are translated in sense or by reproducing an image in the target language to maintain the metaphoric objects,and some simile objects are omitted for explicitness and contextual cohesion.On the sentential level,long and embedded sentences are reorganized in translation and sentences introducing medical operations but with default information are translated by amplification.On the textual level,ambiguous references are clarified,conjunctions are added to make the eerie and illogical translation clearer in sense and lexical cohesion of the text is added by reiteration,thus increasing the textual cohesion of the translation.Under the guidance of explicitation theory,this research shows that these translation strategies can be used to make the target text more explicit and understandable.Besides,this translation report also identifies room for improvement in the translation practice,with the aim of providing a reference for those who are to translate texts containing medical information.