A Corpus-based Study On Explicitation In The English Translation Of President Xi’s Diplomatic Speeches

As a special phenomenon of translation,translation universals have always attracted the attention of scholars.Translation universals include explicitation and implicitation.Compared with implicitation,the phenomenon of explicitation is more concerned by today’s corpus translation scholars.However,most of the current explicit researches only focus on the comparative study of the original text and the target text,while the comparative research on the original text of the target text and the target language is relatively rare.This article takes the explicitation of the English translation of Xi Jinping’s diplomatic speeches as the research object,and builds a Chinese English Parallel Corpus and English Comparable Corpus.By comparing the original text with the target text and translated with non-translated English text,we explore the explicitation phenomenon and its characteristics in the English translation of Xi Jinping’s diplomatic speech,and then analyze the decisive factors that affect the explicitation.The parallel corpus is composed of 20 diplomatic speeches and its English translation texts published by general secretary Xi Jinping from 2016 to 2018.The Chinese speech corpus contains 38167 words and the English speech corpus contains 50617 words.The comparable corpus consists of 12 diplomatic speeches by former US President trump from 2017 to 2020,with a capacity of 95328 words.First,from the three aspects of word number,lexical density and logical conjunction,the parallel corpus is used to compare the original text with the target text,and explore the explicitation phenomenon in the English translation of Xi Jinping’s diplomatic speech.Then,this article conducts intra-language comparison from the perspective of vocabulary density and conjunctions.This is based on the quantitative analysis of statistical calculations on the data extracted from the self-built parallel corpus and comparable corpus to study the degree of explicitation.Finally,the thesis analyzes the factors influencing the explicitation of Xi Jinping’s diplomatic speech from five aspects:language,culture,audience,text and translator.The results show that firstly,in terms of number of words,vocabulary density and connective words,there is a clear trend of explicitation in the translated English diplomatic speech when comparing with original Chinese diplomatic speech.Secondly,in perspective of intra-language comparison,the degree of explicitation in translated diplomatic speech is slightly lower than that in non-translated diplomatic speech.Thirdly,there are five factors influencing explicitation in diplomatic speech translation,which is language system factor,cutural factor,textual factor,receptor factor as well as translator.Based on the statistical data of corpus tools,this thesis makes an empirical study of explicitation,further reveals the explicitation phenomenon between the original text and the translated text,and verifies that explicitation,as the universality of translation,is the basic feature in the process of translation.This research has paved the way for the study of explicitation translation theory,and hopes to provide translators and practitioners with reference opinions and research ideas in future translation practices,so as to improve the quality of English translation of diplomatic speeches.