Abstract

Explicitation has been one of the most important topics in recent translation studies. This research sought to investigate explicitation as a translation universal based on a contrastive analysis between Persian and English languages. The main focus of the study was to confirm the process of explicitation and to investigate the explicitation devices adopted in the Persian translation of the conjunctions between sentences and clauses in an English text. For the purposes of this research, one-third of a novel, namely The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini (2003) and its Persian translation by Mehdi Ghabraei (2006) were scrutinized for any occurrence of shifts of conjunctions. The aim of the research was to test the explicitation hypothesis according to Blum-Kulka (1986) and the model which was followed for the analysis of conjunctive relations was that of Halliday and Hasan (1976). The results of the investigation indicated that the processes of explicitation, implicitation, and also the meaning change were observed in the corpus, although explicitation took a bigger portion in the target text. The analysis of the explicitated conjunctive relations indicated that two devices had been adopted by the translator, namely the addition of conjunctions and replacing punctuation marks with conjunctions. Furthermore, it was found that the translator had explicitated all four types of conjunctive relations, i.e. the additive, adversative, causal and temporal relations; however, from among these conjunctive relations, temporal ones were more explicitly portrayed in the target text.

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