Explicitation in the Spanish–Chinese translation of conditional clauses: a socio-cognitive perspective based on the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis

This study investigates explicitation in the Spanish–Chinese translation of legal texts, with a specific focus on si-introduced conditional clauses. Drawing on a self-compiled parallel corpus, it examines the recurrent use of ruò (若) – a connective that is relatively infrequent in contemporary Chinese legal drafting – when rendering Spanish conditional constructions. While explicitation has been widely discussed in translation studies, its manifestation in the Spanish–Chinese translation of conditional clauses remains underexplored. To account for the observed patterns, this study adopts Halverson's Gravitational Pull Hypothesis (GPH) within its socio-cognitive formulation, using it as an interpretive framework to explore how explicitation may arise from the interaction between cognitive salience and socially mediated legal norms.