A Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s Explicitation Style In His Chinese-English Translation From The Perspective Of Reporting Verbs

Chinese culture and literature cannot get recognized widely without the efforts of many translators at home and abroad.Among them,Howard Goldblatt,an illustrious and noted American translator and sinologist,has made a significant contribution to the introduction and translation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature abroad.Since Mo Yan’s work translated by Goldblatt won the Nobel Prize in Literature,the number of related studies on his translation has increased significantly,and his translation style has always been one of the focuses.Scholars believe that the focus of the study on translation style is to explore and describe translators’ unique and distinctive features of language usage in their translated works,including vocabulary,syntax,rhetoric,cultural language and so on at different levels.Nevertheless,few scholars have studied Goldblatt’s explicitation style.Explicitation,one of translation universals,is to render implicit information in the source text explicit in the target language,which may occur on the level of semantics,grammar,pragmatics,or discourse.With further research on explicitation,researchers have found that translators of different cognitive characteristics tend to employ different explicitation strategies.This research attempts to apply relevance theory to explore Howard Goldblatt’s explicitation style from the perspective of reporting verbs.Reporting verbs refer to verbs that lead speeches and thoughts in projecting clauses.They have the function of showing the language environment at the time,expressing the psychological activities of the narrator,and reflecting the relationship between the characters in the novel.According to their semantic connotation,they can be divided into explicit reporting verbs and implicit reporting verbs.The reporting verbs in the source language can reflect the author’s speeches and thoughts,and the reporting verbs in the translation can also highlight the translator’s translation style.Therefore,in the translation of novels,the translation of reporting verbs is particularly vital.For relatively vague and monotonous reporting verbs in Chinese,according to the explicitation hypothesis,they in the translation should be more specific,diverse,and clear.This thesis mainly employs relevance theory as the theoretical basis to conduct an in-depth exploration of Goldblatt’s explicitation style.Relevance theory believes that a successful translation is to achieve the optimal relevance between the source text and readers of the target language,which requires that the translator infer the writer’s intention of the source text,increase contextual effect based on consideration of readers’ cognitive context and decrease unnecessary processing efforts of readers of the target language.The research is based on a corpus,including five sub-corpora,namely Tales of Hulan River and its source text,Rickshaw Boy and its source text as well as Shi Xiaojing’s Camel Xiangzi.At the lexical and grammatical levels,the author has calculated the token,type,tense,and form of non-predicate of reporting verbs to probe into Goldblatt’s explicitation style.The study attempts to address three questions as follows:(1)Are reporting verbs in the source texts translated by Goldblatt explicitly?(2)Does Goldblatt’s explicitation of reporting verbs reflect his translation style or the translation universal?(3)Does Goldblatt’s explicitation style serve to achieve optimal relevance?This study finds that Howard Goldblatt’s translation does have his unique explicitation from the perspective of reporting verbs.The consistency of Goldblatt’s explicitation style is demonstrated by his explicitation of reporting verbs in Tales of Hulan River and Rickshaw Boy,and the uniqueness of Goldblatt’s explicitation style is revealed by the comparison with Shi’s Camel Xiangzi.At the lexical level,on the one hand,the monotonous reporting verb “say” is added repetitively and frequently,and on the other hand,the relatively monotonous and vague reporting verbs in the source text get semantic explicitation according to the context,thus showing more specific and diverse reporting verbs in his translation.At the grammatical level,Howard Goldblatt tends to use variable tenses and non-predicate forms of reporting verbs.Howard Goldblatt’s explicitation style shows his endeavors to achieve an optimal relevance.Firstly,the reported clauses in the source text are usually guided by a single“说”,so he repetitively added “say” that is similar to the meaning of “说” to make the translation closer to source texts and strengthen the relevance with the source texts.Secondly,in the ostensive-inferential process,Goldblatt conveyed implicit meaning in the context to readers through semantic explicitation to present the communication intention.Last but not least,grammatical explicitation is used to cater to readers’ reading habits and help them recognize the intention of the original texts more accurately without unnecessary processing efforts,thus accomplishing successful communication through constructing the optimal relevance between the source language and the target language.The research has two innovation points.First,compared with previous studies that mainly concentrated on his faithfulness and rebelliousness,the research focuses on his explicitation style in his translation.Secondly,explicitation style is investigated from a specific perspective,reporting verbs,while previous research was conducted from conjunctions and pronouns.