Distinction between explicitation and adjacent concepts

to set it clearly apart from explicitation in its true form. With this proposal, I am neither questioning the validity nor the epistemic value of such comparative explicitness investigations in translation studies. On the contrary, these studies can yield and have in fact yielded important insights into typical patterns or features of translated texts, whether or not we want to classify these as translational universals. My aim is rather to eliminate some of the persistent definitional vagueness surrounding the concept of explicitation in order to make the discourse about explicitation more transparent and to allow the comparison of findings by making sure that different researchers are indeed talking about the same concept.

Even if the question of S-explicitation vs. T-explicitation is answered in favour of the former concept and therefore the focus is laid on explicitation in its original form, the problem of definitional vagueness still persists. This is mainly due to the fact that explicitation is situated between two adjacent concepts with fuzzy boundaries.

14 _{This concept could also be called comparable explicitness so as to point directly to the corpus design that}

Unfortunately, research in the tradition of S-explicitation has not always drawn a distinction between these concepts.

6.2.3.1 Explicitation vs. expansion

The non-distinction between explicitation and expansion – arguably the less controversial of the two adjacent concepts – is particularly evident in the Hungarian tradition of explicitation research established by Klaudy (e.g. 2001). In their typology of explicitation, Klaudy and Károly (2005:15) speak of explicitation “when the meaning of a SL unit is distributed over several units in the ST”, the standard transfer operation in this case being “lexical division”. How this notion of “explicitation” would be applied in practice becomes clear from the following quote by Pápai (2004:159):

If we consider the structural differences between the two languages involved (the agglutinative Hungarian uses fewer words to express the same meaning than the analytical English, e.g. I love you -> Szeretlek), translations from English into Hungarian would be expected to result in implicitation (making things more general, omitting linguistic or extralinguistic information of the ST) rather than in explicitation.

Although the focus is on implicitation in this quote, the example can easily be turned around to show the view on explicitation underlying Pápai’s study. Translating the Hungarian Szeretlek with the English I love you would be considered an instance of explicitation in the Hungarian research tradition. Applying this line of reasoning to another example involving the French futur simple (since my knowledge of Hungarian is very limited), the translation of the French je mangerai by the English I will eat would – according to Pápai’s line of reasoning – constitute an instance of explicitation. If, however, we follow the broad majority of definitions of explicitation in the field that require some kind of information to be verbalized in the target text that is missing in the source text, we are unlikely to find any in the examples just discussed. Neither is there any additional semantic information in the translation nor any additional syntactic information that would cancel alternative semantic interpretations of the utterance. Instead, what the examples show is merely an addition of words in the target text. In the second example, this is due to the fact that the future tense category is expressed by means of suffixation in French, whereas it is marked by the auxiliary verb will in the English translation.15

I would therefore suggest that examples like these should not be treated as instances of explicitation but rather as instances of expansion.16 The term was introduced by Wotjak (1985:32, see Schreiber 1993:22117

Although the different character of the two concepts explicitation and expansion is quite obvious and intuitively plausible and although it is likely that analyses will yield many clear-cut cases that can clearly be attributed to one of the two categories, we should also expect borderline cases that do not lend themselves easily to strict categorization. One example of such borderline cases would perhaps be the optional complementizer that, which Olohan and Baker (2000) investigated in their study discussed earlier in this chapter. Inserting this complementizer in a translation without there being a counterpart in the source text may indeed entail an addition of information in the TT but the semantic contribution of this information will be so low that it can hardly be claimed to be a clear- cut case of explicitation but rather shows strong characteristics of expansion. Because of

) and is defined by Delisle et al. (1999:138) as “[a]n increase in the amount of <text> that is used in the <target language> to express the same semantic content as compared to the parallel segment in the <source text>“. Whether or not expansion is to be expected in translations between a given language combination is fairly easy to predict since, at the structural level, it is a function of the position of source and target language in a morphological language typology (see Bauer 2003). Based on such a typology, analytic languages like English will tend to distribute the same amount of information over more words than synthetic languages, which in turn tend to exhibit a higher number of morphemes per word. This fits with Pápai’s comment above that Hungarian is an agglutinative language, agglutinative being a further sub-classification of synthetic languages.

16 _{In Vinay and Darbelnet’s Stylistique Comparée, the equivalent to expansion would be amplification, which}

is a “translation technique whereby a target language unit requires more words than the source language to express the same idea.” (Vinay/Darbelnet 1995:339). A special form of amplification would be

supplementation, which is a “translation technique of adding lexical items in the target language which are required by its structure and which are absent in the source language” (ibid.:350). To make matters even more complex, there is a further concept related to amplification, namely dilution. Dilution refers to “[t]he translation technique of spreading one meaning over several lexical items” (ibid.:341-342).

17 _{Schreiber (1993:221) claims that instances of expansion are generally accompanied by a higher degree of}

explicitness, which cuts across the distinction proposed here. In this thesis, expansion is viewed as a simple increase in morphemes without any semantic contribution to the utterance, whereas explicitation entails such a semantic contribution, one possible manifestation of this being a higher morpheme count (on the notion of

cases like these, it may be useful to treat explicitation and expansion not as concepts standing in binary opposition to each other but rather as endpoints of a continuum. We could then say that the more semantically relevant the information introduced by a certain shift is, the more we move to the explicitation point of the continuum and vice versa. The insertion of optional complementizers like that would then be located towards the expansion endpoint of the continuum.

6.2.3.2 Explicitation vs. addition

The distinction between explicitation and addition is concerned with the extent to which new information introduced in the target text can reasonably be claimed to be implicit in the source text (see Kamenická 2007:50). The definitional criterion of source text implicitness is present in most of the intertextual definitions of explicitation; however, the complexity associated with this notion is hardly problematized in the studies based on these definitions and the issue is treated rather intuitively in the empirical analyses. Becher (2011:18) seems to be aware of the problems involved since, elaborating on his definition of implicitness,18

[t]he addition of inferable information and the addition of new information should not be treated on a par, since it seems likely that the two kinds of changes are governed by different factors. Studies of explicitation need to take care to exclude additions of new information from analysis […].

he explicitly avoids stipulating “from where the addressee might infer the non-verbalized information“. However, later in his analysis (ibid.:227, my emphasis) Becher distinguishes between inferable and genuinely new information, claiming that

While Becher correctly identifies the central problem here (which he avoided earlier in his definition of implicitness), it could be argued that the distinction between inferable and new information is not theoretically helpful since any information is in some way inferable; the question is only on what basis the inferences take place. Therefore, it seems more reasonable to make a distinction between information inferable based on the source text (which broadly corresponds to the notion of source-text implicitness) and information inferable based on other inputs. The phenomenon described in the latter case is mostly labelled as addition in the literature. Schreiber (1993:229, my translation) comments on the distinction between explicitation and addition as follows:

18 _{“Implicitness is the verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer if it were not}

Explicitation means that the […] information ‘added’ to the TL text must be implicitly contained in the SL text, i.e. it must be inferable from the SL text or be regarded as common knowledge of the SL text recipients; otherwise this is referred to as an addition.

An example of potential addition can be found in Delisle et al. (1999:115):

Beim Bierumsatz handelt es sich zu 85% um ‘Ale’. * About 85% of the beer sold in supermarkets is ale.

Here, the question is whether the inserted information can be reasonably claimed to be implicit in the source text or not (which, of course, cannot be established on the basis of this isolated text string alone). It should be obvious that drawing this borderline between explicitation and addition presents a much more complex challenge than the distinction between explicitation and expansion since, in this case, the researcher is forced to make statements about “content [that] is paradoxically held to be at once hidden and obviously available to all” (Pym 2005:34). Due to the complexity of this task and the lack of any clear-cut and objective criteria for judging which information is implicit in a text and which is not, a detailed theoretical elaboration of the concepts of explicitness and implicitness is required (see 6.4.1). For the same reason, it does again not seem feasible to view explicitation and addition as standing in a binary opposition. Rather, the two concepts should also be viewed as two end-points of a continuum, with clear-cut cases situated on each side and a fuzzy “transition zone” in the middle. The higher the probability, then, that the relevant information is implicit in the source text (i.e. inferable based on this text), the further to the explicitation point of the proposed continuum we move and vice versa.

6.2.3.3 The expansion-explicitation-addition continuum

The explicitation concept is thus positioned between the two adjacent concepts of expansion and addition and the distinction between explicitation and the other two concepts is expected to be not always clear-cut but often a matter of degree. The resulting expansion-explicitation-addition continuum can be graphically presented as follows:

Figure 2: The expansion-explicitation-addition continuum

This continuum should capture the intuitive relation and distinction between expansion, explicitation and addition quite adequately but in order to make theoretically well-founded

statements about the position of empirically established phenomena on this continuum, further theoretical work is required. In the cognitive linguistic discussion of explicitation and implicitation in 6.5.2, I will propose a theoretically better-founded model of this continuum.