Explicitation, implicitation and shift of conjunctions in English-Chinese translations of institutional texts : a corpus-assisted study
Unlike other texts, institutional texts are formal which are supposedly translated literally or formally. In spite of this, there exists a hypothesis called the explicitation hypothesis, proposed by Blum-Kulka (1986), which posits that the translation process encourages explicitation of conjunctions, and that the more complex the texts, like institutional texts, the more explicitation (Whittaker, 2004). There is another contending view that, unlike English, Chinese is a systemically implicit language and this implicitness should be manifested in a reduced use of conjunctions in Chinese translated texts as compared to English source texts. This research sets out to investigate these disagreements empirically. This research will be a corpusassisted study where comparisons are made using parallel corpora (English source texts and their translated Chinese target texts), monolingual comparable corpora (translated Chinese target texts and non-translated Chinese texts) and a combination of both. This study found that the translated texts show a combined influence of the source texts, the interpretation of translators, the influence of the target language and only some influence from the non-translated texts, making
Looi, Wai Ling
Explicitation, implicitation and shift of conjunctions in English-Chinese translations of institutional texts : a corpus-assisted study. Unlike other texts, institutional texts are formal which are supposedly translated literally or formally. In spite of this, there exists a hypothesis called the explicitation hypothesis, proposed by Blum-Kulka (1986), which posits that the translation process encourages explicitation of conjunctions, and that the more complex the texts, like institutional texts, the more explicitation (Whittaker, 2004). There is another contending view that, unlike English, Chinese is a systemically implicit language and this implicitness should be manifested in a reduced use of conjunctions in Chinese translated texts as compared to English source texts. This research sets out to investigate these disagreements empirically. This research will be a corpusassisted study where comparisons are made using parallel corpora (English source texts and their translated Chinese target texts), monolingual comparable corpora (translated Chinese target texts and non-translated Chinese texts) and a combination of both. This study found that the translated texts show a combined influence of the source texts, the interpretation of translators, the influence of the target language and only some influence from the non-translated texts, making
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