A Corpus-Based Study On Explicitation In The C-E News Translation In “Fighting COVID-19” On The Website Of Ministry Of Foreign Affairs

The website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China(MFA)plays a key role in conveying China’s diplomatic policies and attitude and facilitating global communication.Thus,news translation of MFA needs to bridge the enormous differences between Chinese and English languages and cultures by specific translation strategies,including explicitation.Given this,the study aims at exploring three types of explicitation in the news translation on the website of MFA,i.e.denotational explicitation,cohesive explicitation,and interactional explicitation.To conduct the study,three major research questions are put forward:(1)What features of explicitation are found in C-E news translation of MFA?(2)What may be the possible reasons for(non-)explicitation?(3)Based on the research findings above,what explicitation norms are obeyed in the news translation on the website of MFA?A comprehensive methodology combining qualitative and quantitative analysis is adopted in the study.Firstly,a classification of explicitation and its analytical framework are summarized and established based on a literature review.Then,three types of explicitation are tagged and compared in a self-composed bilingual parallel corpus containing 50 pieces of news on the topic of“抗击新冠肺炎疫情”on the website and 50 translated texts.Later,the reasons for explicitation and non-explicitation are explored through textual analysis.Finally,explicitation norms in news translation of MFA are summarized.According to the study,C-E news translation on the website of MFA presents evident explicitness in denotation and cohesion,while interactional explicitness is not evident.In denotational explicitation,the translator tends to supplement background information,facilitate understanding of culture-specific knowledge,clarify political stance,highlight speakers’ attitudes,and increase discourse interactivity.In cohesive explicitation,the translator tends to improve readability and highlight speakers’ attitudes and emotions by explicitizing coreference.In a few cases,coreference is not explicitized for conciseness.The translator also tries to optimize the textual cohesion and highlight authors’ attitudes by explicitizing connectives.Besides,connectives are omitted sometimes due to sentence reconstruction.In interactional explicitation,the TT is highly faithful to the ST to achieve informational equivalence.In a few cases,the reference between the addresser and the addressee is explicitized to reproduce the dialogue situation and it is implicitized to enhance the objectivity of discourse.Based on the research findings,eight explicitation norms are summarized in an attempt to offer practical guidance and reference for practitioners engaging in MFA news translation.