Abstract
This study aims to investigate, using corpus-based approach, the phenomenon of explicitation in Chinese–Japanese Journalistic translation, which is considered a “universal feature” of translated text. It, first, analyzes translation process with a parallel corpus composed of Chinese original texts and Japanese translated texts, and then examines translation product with a comparative corpus composed of translated and non-translated texts in Japanese. The result shows that high frequency of explicitness was found in translation process, that can be sorted into 6 categories: 1) referent manifestation; 2) cohesive reinforcement; 3) emphasis; 4) implication spelling out; 5) background information explanation; and 6) syntax-element supplementation. It was also found that translated texts tends to be more explicit than non-translated texts in the same language, by measuring with the following 3 indicators: 1) mean sentence length; 2) lexical variety with type/token ratio; and 3) the quantity of conjunctions.
