On The Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation ——A Case Study Of Time’s Monster: How History Makes History

Th e content-focused informative texts are logical and well-organized and mainly tell about facts and objects.Their translations are expected to be plain and transmit the referential content.However,since informative texts usually employ many terminologies,long and complex sentences and much background information,translations of such texts are often obscure and make the TT readers confused.This translation report applies the theory of explicitation to carry out case analyses based on the examples chosen from the translation of Chapter 2 of Time’s Monster:How History Makes History.Explicitation refers to the phenomenon that in translation the vague or implicit information in the source text is expressed in a clear and logical way.The book involves much knowledge of the British history,classical European literature,and philosophies of Marx and Engels.For target text readers who are not familiar with the background knowledge,they may encounter some difficulties in their understanding of the book.Based on Klaudy Kinga’s classification of explicitation,this report analyzes the causes of explicitations and classifies its translation strategies into several categories.The chosen cases’ have been sorted into three categories:obligatory explicitation,optional explicitation and pragmatic explicitation.This report adopts eight translation strategies:adding annotations and intra-textual explanations for pragmatic explicitations are;changing parts of speeches and sentence patterns for optional explicitations;dividing and restructuring sentences,specifying substitutions,references,and ellipsis for obligatory explicitations.To summarize,the research finds that explicitation improves the logic and readability of translation,and promotes the translated text readers to understand the content of the book and overcome cultural and linguistic differences.