S-explicitation vs T-explicitation

will be considered in the empirical analysis and they will also make the analysis open to intersubjective debate.

Perhaps the most obvious evidence of the definitional vagueness of explicitation is the fact that, within the framework of corpus-based translation studies, two different strands of explicitation research have emerged which portray two quite different “versions” of this phenomenon. What is even more striking in this context is that, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Heltai 2005:47-48), this dualism has hardly been explicitly verbalized in the literature and the coexistence of the two versions seems to go largely unnoticed. On the one hand, we find canonical definitions in encyclopaedias or dictionaries of translation studies, e.g. Klaudy’s (2_{2009:104) widely accepted definition of explicitation being “the}

technique of making explicit in the target text information that is implicit in the source text”. On the other hand, we find, for example, the following definition by Puurtinen (2004:165-166):

One of the hypothesised universals of translation is explicitation, which can refer either to making implicit source text (ST) information explicit in a translation, or to a higher degree of explicitness in translated texts than in non-translated texts in the same target language (TL).

The main difference between the two definitions is fairly obvious. While in the definition given by Klaudy, explicitation is conceptualized with regard to the translational relation between a source text and a target text, this relation disappears as a necessary criterion in Puurtinen’s definition. In this case, taking the target text as the sole anchor point, explicitation can either be established relative to the source text (which would be the “traditional” notion of explicitation) or relative to another text originally written in the target language, with no translational relation holding between the two texts. With reference to Chesterman’s (2004:39) notions of S-universals and T-universals12_{, I propose}

the two designations S-explicitation and T-explicitation in order to draw a distinction between the two different versions of explicitation. S-explicitation thus refers to the “traditional“ notion of explicitation holding between source and target texts, whereas T- explicitation designates the “new” notion of explicitation that is established between target texts and non-translated texts in the same language.13

In Krüger (forthcoming), I give a detailed account of the history of the explicitation concept starting from its origins in the Stylistique Comparée and identify the circumstances and motivations that led to the division into S-explicitation and T-explicitation in the first place. I will summarize the arguments laid down in this forthcoming article in very concise form here. Until the 1990s, the original concept of S-explicitation was the sole and uncontested version of explicitation and, through the Explicitation Hypothesis, had been firmly anchored in translation studies. The actual division of the concept into S- explicitation and T-explicitation occurred in a seminal article by Baker (1993) in which she highlights the theoretical possibilities of large corpora in translation research (ibid.:234) and thereby lays the groundwork for corpus-based translation studies and for the large-

12 _{“Some hypotheses claim to capture universal differences between translations and their source texts, i.e.}

characteristics of the way in which translators process the source text; I call these S-universals (S for source). Others make claims about universal differences between translations and comparable non-translated texts, i.e. characteristics of the way translators use the target language: I call these T-universals (T for target)” (Chesterman 2004:39).

13 _{While Heltai (2005:48) claims that “[e]xplicitation can be regarded as either an S- or a T-universal, or}

both”, it must be pointed out that in Chesterman’s typology of S-Universals and T-Universals, explicitation is clearly treated as an S-Universal (Chesterman 2004:40).

scale study of the previously mentioned universals of translation (6.1.2). In the course of the article, Baker proposes various possible universals of translation that would warrant large-scale corpus research, the first being a “marked rise in the level of explicitness compared to specific source texts and to original texts in general” (ibid., italics added). Baker’s article is – to the best of my knowledge – the first to use the term “explicitation“ in relation to both specific source texts and to original target language texts in general. Baker thereby openly proposes a shift of focus away from the ST-TT relation of explicitation, which until then had been a definitional criterion of explicitation. Given the huge influence that this article and further papers by Baker on the same topic (e.g. 1995, 1996, 1999) had in establishing the field of corpus-based translation studies, this second version of explicitation quickly spread in the field and was investigated in various empirical corpus studies. Perhaps the most prominent of these studies is Olohan and Baker’s (2000) quantitative investigation of T-explicitation using a comparable corpus design (see 6.1.3 above). In their study, the authors investigate the use of the optional complementizer that

in connection with the reporting verbs say and tell and come to the conclusion that the that- connective features far more prominently in translated texts whereas the zero-connective (i.e. the non-verbalization of the optional complementizer) is more frequent in original texts. These results are interpreted as possible evidence for subconscious processes of explicitation in translation and can be seen as supportive of Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis. This study firmly anchored T-explicitation as an empirically fruitful concept to be applied in corpus-based translation studies.

However, despite the huge popularity of T-explicitation in corpus-based translation studies, there are several problems involved in this new version of explicitation. In Krüger (forthcoming), I show that, if we investigate one and the same translation with regard to its source text (this would be an investigation of S-explicitation) and with regard to another text originally written in the target language (T-explicitation), we may obtain contradictory results regarding whether the translator performed explicitations or implicitations. Since S- explicitation is the original, well established and widely accepted concept, I claim that this casts doubt on the status of T-explicitation as a true form of explicitation. Furthermore, I argue that T-explicitation cannot be investigated in a translation process study since the original target-language texts used to establish this phenomenon in the first place fall completely outside the actual translation process, which “only” comprises a translator interpreting a source text and producing a target text. In process studies of T-explicitation, we would end up retrospectively attributing explicitation decisions to the translator which

s/he never made in the first place since one of the comparison standards (the original target-language texts) falls completely outside the translator’s cognitive reality and translational action. This is highly problematic since the translator is the agent who is performing the alleged explicitations to be subsequently analyzed. Finally, I argue that Baker’s (1993) original motivation for introducing T-explicitation – which behaves in a fundamentally different way than the original concept of S-explicitation – as a second version of explicitation is not made clear. It seems that the attempted dissociation of explicitation from the source text and its reorientation toward the wider target language environment may have been an ideological by-product of the more general shift away from the normative and source-text oriented equivalence paradigm of the 1980s that was propagated by Descriptive Translation Studies and subsequently by corpus-based translation studies.

In light of the reasons illustrated above, I conclude that the notion of T-explicitation should be abandoned. To do justice to the fundamental differences between this concept and the original concept of S-explicitation and to make the discourse about explicitation more transparent, I propose the designation comparative explicitness14