Explicitation in English-Persian Literary Translation[Latin Thesis]

Fatemeh Ebrahimi Varkiani

Literary texts are rooted deeply in the culture and history of their languages. This fact makes the literary translation a complicated task. Explicitation as one of the translation universals has also a significant role in literary translation. The present study tried to deepen the understanding of explicitation in literary translation by exploring all types of explicitation in translated literary texts. Moreover, it is an attempt to investigate whether the target texts' explicitness is affected by the text style of postmodern genre. In other words, this study is conducted to determine the amount of translators' faithfulness to the odd and different style which is imposed intentionally on postmodern texts. It also was conducted to find out the strategies used by translators during the explicitation process. For this purpose, the researcher chose 80 pages of 4 classic English novels and 80 pages of 4 postmodern English novels with their first published translations as the corpus of the study. Through the precise analysis of the corpus, 676 instances of explicitation were found, from which, 361 instances were derived from the classic novels and they are 53.40 % of the whole, and 315 instances were derived from the postmodern novels which are 46.60 % of the whole. The results did not show a considerable difference between the two genres; so, it cannot be said that the style of postmodern novels affects the level of explicitness in target texts. The 10.66 % difference is found between the amount of explicitation in the two genres may be the result of some other reasons. Furthermore, the researcher proposed a tentative list of 10 strategies which are applied by the translators for making the implicit information of the source texts explicit. The findings of this study can be helpful for all translators who want to have a more comprehensive look over this concept; it also can help the novice translators to become familiar with the way that other translators overcome the problems caused by the implicit messages of the source texts. Explicitation- Literary translation- Translation universal- Genre