Characteristics of the explicitation of logical relations in the translation from Chinese to Spanish and its motivations

Abstract

This work studies the explicitation in the Spanish translation of the work Rana by Chinese author Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel laureate in Literature, by revealing the characteristics of the explicitation and deciphering its motivations. The corpus-based quantitative method is used to describe the use of logical conjunctions in the target text and their correspondence to the source text, as well as the Spanish translation of the explicit logical relations in the original text. The results show that the explicitation is more relevant than the implication in each category of logical relations and conjunctions; the degree of explicitation decreases in the causal and consecutive, conditional, adversative, and concessive logical relationships; the connectors of the same category present different degrees of explicitness. In addition, the analysis from the perspectives of linguistics and the translator reveals that the main motivation of explicitation lies in the differences between Chinese and Spanish in the organization of the text and the explanation of the translator. Different degrees of explicitness of the relations and connectors stem from the differences between both languages in the frequency of use of the four relation categories and the translator's subjectivity.