How discourse context decides adversity explicitation from English to Chinese: a case study of Chinese adversative 但 “but”

Adversity explicitation is the verbalization of the covert adversity textual meaning in translation. This paper reports a case study of the Chinese stereotypical adversative 但 “but” as the translation explicitation from the source language of English. The study is carried out on corpora of three different genres: international legislation, financial editorial, and public speech. The quantitative results show adversity explicitation as genre-general as well as genre-specific. The qualitative analysis then attributes genre-specific adversity explicitations to the “imported” intersubjectivity argumentation in international legislation and to the hybridization of this discourse meaning with lexico-grammatical and pragmatic features of the target language. Genre-general adversity explicitations are attributed to English–Chinese contrasts in information structuring. Chinese adversity explicitations can be the choices by the translator to recreate the topic continuity and asymmetric information structure in discourse. The findings of this study suggest how discourse context decides the language pair-specific type of explicitation. It is argued that a motivated and adequate explanation for translation explicitation should be in the framework of cross-linguistic contrasts in genre norms and information structure.