The Use Of Explicitation Strategy:A Report On The Translation Of The CIIS Blue Book On International Situation And China’s Foreign Affairs(2021/2022)

The CIIS Blue Book on International Situation and China’s Foreign Affairs is an annual series of publications by the China Institute of International Studies(CIIS),a research institute affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.The Blue Book discusses the situation in major regions and explains the fruitful results of China’s foreign affairs in 2021,providing readers with a Chinese perspective on the world situation.The author undertook the translation of the first chapter and the ninth chapter of the English version of the Blue Book,which respectively deal with the political situation in the United States and Africa in 2021.Explicitation is regarded as both a universal feature in translated texts and a translation strategy adopted by translators.As a translation universal,Blum-Kulka first proposes the explicitation hypothesis which refers to a more redundant translation text with explanatory remarks added and coherence enhanced.As a translation strategy,the translator uses additions,deletions,substitutions,analogies,explanations,and other means to make the implicit information in the source text explicit in the target text due to both subjective and objective factors.Political texts and diplomatic discourse bear important functions such as negotiation,reconciliation,and mediation,and the explicitation strategy is widely used in the translation of such texts to achieve effective communication between multiple parties.This thesis takes explicitation as the analytic framework and classifies explicitation into obligatory explicitations at the lexico-grammatical level,optional explicitations at the syntactic level,and pragmatic explicitations at the extra-linguistic level based on Klaudy and Papai’s classification and analyzes selected examples from the translation text to explore the use of explicitation strategy in the translation of political and diplomatic texts.As for obligatory explicitations,the addition of pronouns and the explicitation of parallel structures make the target text structurally complete and grammatically correct.In terms of optional explicitations,the addition of connective,sentence-length variation,and adjustment of the logic improve the readability of the target text and make the translation natural and intelligible to the target language readers.Regarding pragmatic explicitation,the translation of cultural-specific items and metaphors help the target language readers understand the culture of the source language and comprehend the source text.