Language students’ acquisition of explicitation as a procedural strategy in Chinese-English translation

In the literature, translation techniques are either presented with a summary of practical experiences or examples in the translation of a particular text type (e.g., Le, 2000; Yu, 2012) or largely discussed from a theoretical point of view (e.g., Ge, 2002; Hu, 2009), but few studies, if any, are empirical or evidence-based, or focus on students’ acquisition of translation techniques, let alone that of explicitation. With a triangulation of process-based and product-based approaches, this study is a new attempt to investigate students’ acquisition of explicitation, a translation technique first identified by Vinay and Darbelnet ([1958] 1995) as “making explicit in the target language what remains implicit in the source language” (p. 342) and a key term that has received much attention since the widespread use of corpora in translation studies in the late 1990s.

Explicit teaching of explicitation as a strategic procedure from a social constructivist perspective was applied to an experimental group to investigate the effectiveness of this intervention. Data revealed that participants in the experimental group were more effective in their post-test translation performances in terms of the two parameters of smoothness and the total score, showing statistically significant gains where their peers in the control group did not. Further, they showed in similar comparison with their peers and their own pre-test performances significant improvement in effective employment of pragmatic explicitation in the texts. However, there was no significant improvement in terms of the faithfulness parameter between the experimental and the control group and an analysis of the levels of the total scores of both groups indicated that no participants got an “excellent” or “good” score and the majority of them only got a “passable” one. Survey data of open-ended questions, translation journals, interview data and TAPs all revealed “Explicitation-taught” participants’ awareness of using this translation technique in translating. However, an analysis of their TAPs and translations revealed that there was a gap between what they knew about explicitaion and how they performed as reflected in the target texts they produced. On the other hand, an analysis of the participants’ translations of 28 key points in assignments revealed their inconsistent and unstable performances as novice translators with relatively low average accurate rates in their employment of explicitation from the perspectives of the four procedures of addition, clarification, foregrounding, and specification in relation to obligatory and optional explicitation and the grammatical, lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic dimension.

In summary, the present study was an attempt to investigate language students’ acquisition of explicitation with a view of shedding light on instruction of translation techniques.