Cohesive Explicitation in Translations

This paper supplies the results of a study of explicitating cohesive shifts in translations of English fiction texts into Swedish. On the basis of the results, the paper discusses different potential explanations for the phenomenon of translational explicitation. The subject of the paper relates specifically to the theme of “Computing and Multilingual, Multicultural Heritage” in that it focuses on cross-cultural and cross-linguistic mediation as a specific type of text production (cf. Baker 1995). This aspect of text production is particularly relevant to a small language such as Swedish, since a great deal of text published in Swedish is translated text. Moreover, very many translated texts are translations from English (cf. Wollin 1998).

Explicitation is a generic term for the different ways in which implicit source text content is being made explicit in the target language text through translation. Examples of such explicitation are cases in which a surface item is added in the target text, or cases where an item is made more semantically specific or more prominent in the target text (cf. Séguinot 1988). Explicitation is often claimed to be one of the more common typical features of translated texts (e.g. Chesterman 1997:71; Marco 2000:13). Further, explicitation has been listed among other proposed translation universals such as normalization and simplification (Baker 1996). However, although the phenomenon of explicitation is often pointed to, and although a small number of studies of varying scope and size have been carried out for some languages, it has generally not been empirically verified on a large scale in corpus studies. As for English and Swedish, no corpus research has been carried out which is specifically directed towards explicitation in Swedish translations of English texts.

A class of items which has been proposed to be likely to be explicitated is cohesive markers (Blum-Kulka 1986). This hypothesis has been confirmed by studies on explicitation in translation between different language pairs (cf. e.g. Weissbrod 1992; Klaudy 1993; Englund Dimitrova 1993; Øverås 1998). The explicitation of cohesive markers is the specific area of explicitation with which the study accounted for in the paper is concerned. In the investigation, the perspective is limited to grammatical cohesion. (Grammatical cohesion is described in terms of the frameworks in Halliday and Hasan 1976, Halliday 1994 and Nyström 2001.) The investigation focuses on explicitation of cohesive relations on the clause and sentence levels. Further, the area under study is restricted to explicitation through addition and semantic specification, i.e. not explicitation through changes in focus or items being given greater prominence by other means.

The corpus used for the investigation is The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), a combined comparable and parallel aligned corpus of English and Swedish original and translated fiction and non-fiction texts (cf. Altenberg, Aijmer and Svensson 2001). The structure of the corpus allows the comparison of non-translated and translated texts in the target language as well as the comparison of target language translated texts and their source language counterparts. The direction of translation studied is translation from English into Swedish, and the material used for the investigation is the fiction part of the ESPC. The method employed is computer-aided manual coding of corpus material. The further purpose of this type of coding is to establish a basis for formulating adequate search techniques for studying explicitation in corpora through automatic retrieval of surface patterns.

In addition to describing explicitating cohesive shifts of translation, a further aim of the paper is to tentatively discuss the distinction between systemically and pragmatically conditioned explicitation. The purpose of this discussion is to distinguish between such explicitating shifts that result from systemic linguistic contrast between the two languages involved, and shifts that have occurred in the absence of such typological restrictions, and that can thus be supposed to be more related to other factors. Examples of such factors are target community linguistic and translation norms, register differences, properties of specific source texts and the stylistic preferences of individual translators.

The findings of the study are expected to be of some relevance for translation research as well as translation teaching. The relevance for research is first of all the empirical description of explicitating shifts in translation from English into Swedish. Secondly, the findings are expected to contribute to the development of adequate tools and methodologies for retrieving material indicating explicitation from corpora. Thirdly, the findings are expected to contribute to theoretical development in the area of explicitation. Finally, the relevance for teaching is expected to be that a better description of explicitation will supply a better basis for discussions about explicitation and its role in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication.

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