Abstract
Taking the English version translated by E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun as the research subject, this study constructs a bespoke Chinese-English parallel corpus covering the “Cultivation of Grains” and “Dyeing Techniques” chapters of the ancient Chinese scientific classic T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu. A three-dimensional annotation framework centering on semantics, syntax and pragmatics is established to analyze explicitation phenomena in scientific and technological text translation through quantitative statistical analysis and qualitative textual discussion. With manual annotation of 337 aligned bilingual sentence pairs, the research identifies a high frequency of explicitation in the target text, with an overall explicitation rate of 87.8%. This empirical result strongly validates Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis in the context of classical Chinese scientific translation. Statistical data indicates that syntactic explicitation occupies the largest proportion among all explicitation types, which is primarily attributable to the fundamental typological disparities between Chinese and English linguistic systems. Semantic supplementary explicitation ranks second, reflecting translators’ intentional semantic reconstruction to clarify ambiguous and vague expressions in classical Chinese texts. Pragmatic explicitation, by contrast, serves to eliminate cross-cultural cognitive barriers between source text authors and target text readers. The formation of such multi-dimensional explicitation features is jointly determined by typological differences between classical Chinese and modern English, the unique cultural attributes of ancient scientific texts, and the translator’s adaptive translation strategies. This research summarizes the inherent explicitation rules in the English translation of traditional Chinese scientific classics via empirical corpus data, offering an innovative research perspective for subsequent studies on classic text translation.
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