Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus

Abstract

Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables to be investigated. The two terms — and their usage by other scholars — will be discussed. An electronic corpus will then be described which provides the empirical data and techniques for information extraction. For the investigation carried out using our corpus, indicators will then be derived on the basis of which operationalizations and hypotheses can be formulated for patterns of explicitation occurring between source and target texts. Some initial results relating to cohesive explicitness and explicitation in the data will be presented and discussed, with particular attention being paid to the areas of ‘reference’, ‘substitution‘, ‘ellipsis’, ‘conjunction’, and ‘lexical cohesion’. First attempts will also be made at explaining the findings.

The Role of Expectedness in the Implicitation and Explicitation of Discourse Relations

“…Specific deletions or additions of connectives in human translations have often been attributed to differences in linguistic resources between the languages in a translation pair (e.g. Becher, 2011;Hansen-Schirra et al, 2007). Other studies, however, have proposed that the deletion or addition of a connective is (also) dependent on the type of discourse relation a connective signals (e.g.…”

Can Frequency Account for the Grammatical Choices of Children and Adults in Nominal Modification Contexts? Evidence from Elicited Production and Child-Directed Speech

“…In both the agent-and patient-modifying contexts, participle constructions are reported to be rare in the majority of studies (Pakkanen-Kilpiä 2004;Struckmeier 2007;Lübbe and Rapp 2011). Investigating English-German translation texts from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) found that the German version used finite RCs more often than non-finite constructions, including participles (see also Hansen and Hansen-Schirra 2012). Apart from its rare use, a high degree of individual and stylistic variation has been noted, with participles sometimes being preferred over RCs (Weber 1971;Doherty 2006;Fabricius-Hansen 2010).…”

Explicitation in Translation Studies: The journey of an elusive concept

“…Since then, the focus has been on proving her hypothesis of the universality of explicitation while continuing to explore what qualifies as explicitation. Examples of such studies include those done by Séguinot (1988), Weissbrod (1992), Øverås (1998), and later by Olohan and Baker (2000), Klaudy (2004), Frankenberg-Gracia (2004, Puurtinen (2004), Pápai (2004), Hansen-Schirra, Neumann & Steiner (2007, and Klaudy and Károly (2005). Most of these studies share a relatively similar interest, i.e.…”

“…The study of Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) also investigates explicitation in light of the traditional encoded/inferred notion. While the scholars believe that explicitation may occur at different levels of interpretation, including "high-level interpretations" by human interlocutors (hence, pragmatic) (2007, p. 243), their research focuses on "properties of encoding".…”

“…Another problem with their study is the use of comparable corpora in explicitation research. This method has been criticized as working against the relational nature of explicitation (see Hansen-Schirra et al, 2007), as the compiled translated and non-translated texts are not necessarily related to each other. Heltai (2005) argues that such a method would yield a different type of phenomenon.…”