Explicitation In The Translation Practice Of American Culture In The 1990s

American Culture in the 1990 s focuses on the dramatic cultural transformations of the last decade of the 20 th century.In the 1990 s,national traumas such as the collapse of the socialist bloc in the former Soviet Union and the outbreak of the war on terror lend an apocalyptic air to the decade,but the book looks beyond this to a wider context to identify new voices emerging in the nation.This is one of the first attempts to bring together developments taking place across a range of different fields: from Microsoft to the Internet,from blank fiction to gangsta rap,and from postfeminism to posthumanism.Therefore,this book is a vivid and enlightening introduction to a complex and changing decade,from which readers can understand the characteristics and development trend of American culture in this period.Therefore,the translation study of this book is of great practical and historical significance.Newmark’s communicative translation theory emphasizes that the target text should give the target readers the same feeling as the source text readers have when reading the target text,instead of faithfully copying the text of the source text as far as possible.In communicative translation,the translator has more freedom to interpret the source text and adjust the style to eliminate ambiguity.Explicitaton translation strategy is a translation strategy that presents information in the target text in a more clear way than the original text.After explicitation,the target text can highlight the implied linguistic information,so that the target text readers can have a more comprehensive and correct understanding of the original text.However,in the process of translating the text,the translator finds that due to the differences between English and Chinese,many implicit information of the original text is not highlighted,such as abstract nouns,implicit logic,cultural background information,etc.Therefore,under the guidance of Newmark’s communicative translation theory and explicitation translation strategy,the translator analyzes the implied information from the perspectives of vocabulary and sentences,and adopts various compensatory means,such as adding annotations and meaning extension,in an effort to reproduce the spirit of the original text in a clear way and enhance the readability of the translated text.This not only proves that explicitation strategy has guiding significance for the translation of informative texts,but also enriches the corpus in this field,in the hope of providing reference materials for scholars in this field.This report is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is the description of translation tasks,which mainly introduces text selection and text analysis.Chapter Two describes three stage of translation process: preparation before translation,translation process,and modification after translation.Chapter Three is a literature review,introducing the research progress of Newmark’s communicative translation theory and explicitation strategy.Chapter Four is the case study,which is the focus of this report.It mainly includes the application of annotation and word meaning extension in vocabulary explicitation and the application of pronoun reference and explicit logic in sentence explicitation.Chapter Five is the summary of translation practice,which summarizes the author’s experience and lessons in applying explicitation translation strategy to the translation of informative text,and sums up the shortcomings of this practice.