On Lengthening and Explicitation in the Process of Translating: An Empirical Study Based on Translation Tests of MTI Students
Abstract
The concept of “universals of translation” was first proposed by Toury (1977). Later, Toury (2004, p.17) argues that he first used the word “universals”, but then he preferred the word “laws” because of the possibility of exception built into it. We believe that lengthening is a major manifestation of explicitation and thus the two aspects are consistent with each other. The current paper plans to seek empirical evidence to the argumentation of “universals/laws” of translation by designing two experiments. Statistical results indicate that there is obvious explicitation in English-Chinese translation, while Chinese-English translation negates the hypothesis of explicitation.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11546
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