EXPLICITNESS OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN TWO VIETNAMESE TRANSLATIONS OF AN ENGLISH NOVEL

Abstract

This preliminary qualitative research aims to examine the changes in the level of explicitness of cohesive elements during the translation process. It does so by comparing an excerpt from Jane Austen's English novel "Pride and Prejudice" (1993) with its two Vietnamese translations by Diep Minh Tam (2002) and Lam Quynh Anh and Thien Nga (2017). The study focuses on how these translations handle cohesive elements based on Halliday and Hassan's cohesion taxonomy (1976). It also considers the tendency for explicitation, as suggested by Blum-Kulka's hypothesis (1986) and Gumul's framework (2017). The analysis involves identifying these cohesive devices in the source text and comparing them with their counterparts in the target texts to detect translational shifts towards greater explicitness. Additionally, the study examines how the two Vietnamese translations differ from each other in handling these elements. The findings of this descriptive study reveal that both Vietnamese translations employ explicitation techniques, including reiteration, the transformation of pro-forms into lexical cohesion, and the restoration of substitution and clausal ellipses used in the original text. The analysis also reflects different translation decisions in transferring the same source language content into the target language between the two translators, which manifests in the usage of explicitation shifts in the target language texts under study.