Explicitation revisited: a corpus-based study of the shifts of causal relations in the English translation of Chinese ecological discourse

Despite extensive research on explicitation in translation, the semantic factors influencing explicitation still remain underexplored. This study adopts a corpus-based approach to examine the shifts of causal relations in the explicitation of causal connectives in the English translation of Chinese ecological discourse. The analyses of the parallel corpus reveal a preference for representing causal relations as non-volitional (independent of human intention) in English translations compared with original Chinese texts. Furthermore, the results of the comparable corpus show a significantly higher frequency of non-volitional relations and a significantly lower frequency of epistemic relations (involving human inference) in English translations compared with original English texts. Taken together, these findings suggest a tendency toward a more objective representation of causality in translation, which extends previous research on the role of semantic factors in explicitation.