Abstract: On the basis of a self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus of business texts, the present research makes a quantitative and qualitative study on interlingual implicitation, and its underlying motivations in the process of English-Chinese translation of business discourse, with conditional conjunctions and adversative conjunctions as examples. The results show that in business discourse, interlingual implicitation is not significant in conditional conjunctions or adversative conjunctions. The degree of implicitation of adversative conjunctions is slightly lower than that of conditional conjunctions. Besides, conjunctive implicitation is closely related to specific logical conjunctions. Through further analysis, it is found that translator factors, linguistic differences and communicative pragmatic factors affect conjunctive implicitation and its degree in the English-Chinese translation of business discourse. The research will, to a certain extent, provide translation strategies for improving the readability of business English-Chinese translation texts.

Key words: implicitation, business English, corpus, conditional conjunction, adversative conjunction