Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts

251 Pages·0.755 MB·English

by  Becher Viktor.

Explicitation and implicitation in
translation
A corpus-based study of English-German and
German-English translations of business texts
DissertationzurErlangungderWürdedes
DoktorsderPhilosophie
derFachbereicheSprache,Literatur,Medien
&EuropäischeSprachenundLiteraturender
UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG
vorgelegtvon
ViktorBecher
ausWasserburgamInn
Hamburg,2011
Hauptgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. JulianeHouse
Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. KristinBührig
DatumderDisputation: 19.08.2011
AngenommenvonderFakultätfürGeisteswissenschaftenderUniversität
Hamburgam: 22.08.2011
Veröffentlicht mit Genehmigung der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften
derUniversitätHamburgam: 08.09.2011
For my mother,
Klaudia Becher
Abstract
This book presents a study of explicitation and implicitation in transla-
tion. Explicitating and implicitating shifts were manually identified in
a corpus of English and German business texts and their translations in
both directions. Shifts were classified according to formal and functional
critieria. The study departed from the observation that explicitations in
one translation direction are often not ‘counterbalanced’ by implicitations
in the other direction (cf. Klaudy’s Asymmetry Hypothesis). The main
aim of the study was to specify the conditions under which this state of
‘explicitationalasymmetry’canbeobserved.
Unlike most other studies of explicitation in translation, the present
study did not depart from the assumption of a ‘translation-inherent’, uni-
versalprocessofexplicitation(cf. Blum-Kulka’sExplicitationHypothesis).
Rather, the prediction underlying the study was that every instance of ex-
plicitation (and implicitation) can be explained as a result of lexicogram-
matical and/or pragmatic factors. This prediction was essentially con-
firmed by the study’s findings. Thorough qualitative analysis has made
it possible to compile a list of factors that regularly lead translators to ex-
plicitate or implicitate. The factors explain why implicitations are often
outnumberedbythecorrespondingexplicitations.
4
Acknowledgements
Iwouldliketothankthefollowingpeople:
• First and foremost, I wish to thank my supervisor Juliane House for
her exemplary support, which has by far exceeded the normal re-
sponsibilities of a thesis supervisor. Thank you for helping me with
any kind of problem quickly and unbureaucratically, and thank you
for giving me the freedom that I needed to design and execute the
researchthathasformedthebasisofthisbook.
• I am indebted to Svenja Kranich and Hardarik Blühdorn for much
stimulating discussion of my work, which has certainly contributed
toimprovingthisbook.
• This book was written in LYX, a free writing software program. I
thankthecreatorsofLYXfordistributingthisgreatpieceofsoftware
freeofchargeunderafreesoftwarelicense.
Finally, I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Ger-
manResearchFoundation)fortheirfinancialsupport. Thisbookwaswrit-
ten in the context of the project Covert Translation. The project led by
Juliane House is located at the University of Hamburg’s Research Centre
on Multilingualism, which has been sponsored by the German Research
Foundationforatotaloftwelveyears.
5
Contents
I Background 9
1 Introduction 10
1.1 Howtoreadthisbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.1.1 Howthebookisstructured . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.2 Theapproachtakeninthisbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3 Definingexplicitationandimplicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2 Previousresearch 20
2.1 Typesofexplicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2 TheExplicitationHypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.1 ProblemswiththeExplicitationHypothesis . . . . . 25
2.3 StudiesontheExplicitationHypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3.1 Subconscious processes of syntactic explicitation?
Thecaseofreportingthat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3.2 ReportingthatinGerman-Englishtranslations . . . . 32
2.3.3 Explicitation and implicitation in literary transla-
tionsbetweenEnglishandNorwegian . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.4 AdditionsofconnectivesintranslatedChinese . . . . 39
2.3.5 OtherstudiesontheExplicitationHypothesis . . . . 42
2.4 Qualitativestudiesonexplicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.4.1 Explicitationasanorm-dependentphenomenon . . . 48
2.4.2 Explicitationandtranslatorstyle . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.4.3 Expertiseandexplicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.4.4 ExplicitnessinEnglishandGermandiscourse . . . . 55
2.5 TheAsymmetryHypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.5.1 MotivatingtheAsymmetryHypothesis . . . . . . . . 59
2.5.2 Whatexplicitationalasymmetrylookslikeinpractice 64
2.6 StudiesontheAsymmetryHypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.6.1 Explicitational asymmetry in translations of report-
ingverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
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CONTENTS 7
2.6.2 Obligatory additions vs. optional omissions in
translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.6.3 Explicitation and implicitation of causal relations in
translationsbetweenDutchandFrench . . . . . . . . 72
2.7 Summaryandconclusion(andabriefoutlook) . . . . . . . . 73
3 Methodology 77
3.1 Awordofcaution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.2 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.4 Identificationandclassificationofshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.5 Interactionalshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.6 Cohesiveshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.6.1 Shiftsinvolvingcoreferentialexpressions . . . . . . . 96
3.6.2 Shiftsinvolvingtheencodingofsemanticrelations . 99
3.7 Denotationalshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.7.1 Additionsandomissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.7.2 Substitutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.8 Shiftsexcludedfromanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
3.9 Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.10 Summaryandconclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
II Results 125
4 Interactionalshifts 126
4.1 Pronoun-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.1.1 Additionsandomissionsofpronouns . . . . . . . . . 128
4.1.2 Substitutionsofpronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.2 Propername-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
4.2.1 Additionsandomissionsofpropernames . . . . . . 143
4.2.2 Substitutionsofpropernames . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
4.3 Summaryandconclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5 Cohesiveshifts 149
5.1 Pronoun-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
5.1.1 Additionsandomissionsofpronouns . . . . . . . . . 151
5.1.2 Substitutionsofpronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
5.2 Noun-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
5.2.1 Additionsofnouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
5.2.2 Omissionsofnouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
CONTENTS 8
5.2.3 Substitutionsofnouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
5.3 Connective-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
5.3.1 Additionsandomissionsofconnectives . . . . . . . . 170
5.3.2 Substitutionsofconnectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
5.4 Summaryandconclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
6 Denotationalshifts 190
6.1 Noun-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
6.1.1 Additionsandomissionsofnouns . . . . . . . . . . . 191
6.1.2 Substitutionsofnouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
6.2 Adjective-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
6.2.1 Additions,omissions,andsubstitutionsofadjectives 202
6.3 Adverb-basedshifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
6.3.1 Additionsandomissionsofadverbs . . . . . . . . . . 210
6.4 Summaryandconclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
7 Conclusion 216
A SomeEnglish-Germancontrasts 220
A.1 IsGermanmoreexplicitthanEnglish? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
A.1.1 Explicitnessingrammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
A.1.2 Explicitnessindiscourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
A.2 InteractionalityinEnglishandGerman . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
B Listofcorpustexts 233
Bibliography 235
Part I
Background
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Chapter 1
Introduction
This book presents a study that has counted and analyzed explicitat-
ing and implicitating shifts in a corpus of English-German and German-
English translations of business texts. The aim of the study was to find
out when and why (i.e. under which conditions) translators explicitate
or implicitate. In this introductory chapter, I give some advice on how to
readthisbook(Section1.1),presentthelinguisticallyorientedapproachto
translation taken – and advocated – in the book (Section 1.2), and provide
definitionsofsomebasicterms(Section1.3).
1.1 How to read this book
Dear reader, I have good news for you: You can skip this chapter! In fact,
youcanskipquitealotwhenreadingthisbook,sinceIhavedonemybest
to make it as reader-friendly as possible. In particular, the book exhibits
thefollowingfeaturesaimedatmaximizingusability:
Noabbreviations. To optimize readability, I have refrained from using
anyabbreviationsinthisbook.
Transparentstructure. Ihavetriedtostructurethisbookastransparently
as possible, allowing you to selectively read those parts that are of
interesttoyouwhileskippingothers. Ihavetakengreatcaretosplit
the book into sections and chapters that may be read independently
of each other (though this has not always been possible). In particu-
lar, Chapters 4 through 6, where the results of the study forming the
basis of this book are presented, do not build up on each other, so
thateachchaptercanbereadseparately. Whatismore,eachofthese
three chapters is centered around a number of observations that are
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