Reframed narrativity in literary translation: an investigation of the explicitation of cohesive chains

Explicitation is a key concept in translation studies referring to turning what is implicitly narrated in a source text into explicit narration in a target text; it has been widely studied from different aspects across language pairs and genres. However, while most previous studies investigate explicitation through a few indicators of explicitness, most of which are specific logical links and connectives, textual explicitness encompasses far beyond these. To date, little attention has been paid, especially in literary translation, to semantic explicitation, which is realized through cohesive chains in textual development. Since cohesive chains represent the development of events and characters throughout the text, it is assumed the more there are of them, the more tangible a text is in realizing its meaning within its context. This research, therefore, sets out to investigate the cohesive chains in a Chinese classic novel, Hong Lou Meng, and in its two English translations, The Dream of the Red Mansions and A Story of the Stone, with an emphasis on how the texts are manifested as narratives in the respective contexts with different readers. It has found a trend of explicitation in translation from Chinese source text to English target texts in terms of the numbers of cohesive chains and the lexical items forming the chains. It has also found differences in the distribution of different types of cohesive chains (identity chains and similarity chains), which represent distinctive patterns of realizing the context in each text. The interpretation of these different stylistic features in narrative reflects both typological differences and translators’ choices.

Sistem Kekerabatan dalam novel Hong Lou Meng karya Cao Xueqin: Analisis Sosiologi Sastra

This study describes the kinship system adhered to by the people of East Asia, especially the People's Republic of China. The rich and diverse kinship system is clearly illustrated and applied in a large family during the dynastic kingdom in China. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the kinship system in Hong Lou Meng novel by Cao Xueqin. In addition, this novel also tells about a family that contains many different kinship systems. This research belongs to a descriptive-qualitative perspective. The results of the analysis show an overview of the kinship system contained in a large family in Ancient China about the Chinese ethnic kinship system in the past through Hong Lou Meng novel by Cao Xueqin.

On Translation of Social Terms in Hong Lou Meng

Translation is a bridge that leads different language speakers to understand each other. Translation of literature works, particularly those with large numbers of cultural elements, is the concern of translatology and many researchers. The Chinese classic novel Hong Lou Meng is right the case. This paper compares some cases in the address term translation in two different versions of translation, namely Yang Xianyi’s and David Hawks’, and tries to analyze them in combination with Lawrence Venuti’s theory of domestication and foreignization.