Explicitating and Implicitating Source Text Ideology

Abstract

The article applies to translation some ideas from critical discourse analysis and discusses the potential effects of translational solutions on the ideological content of texts in the light of a small-scale study on student translations. Ideology refers here to the ways in which linguistic choices made by the writer or translator of a text, first, create a particular perspective on the events portrayed, second, may reflect the writer's opinions and attitudes, and third, may be used to influence readers' opinions. Particular linguistic structures, such as vocabulary, finite and nonfinite constructions, active and passive forms, and grammatical metaphors, can be seen as conscious or unconscious strategies which realise ideological meanings. In translation, ideologically motivated linguistic structures of a source text may be manipulated either unintentionally because of insufficient language and/or translation skills or lacking knowledge of the relationship between language and ideology, or intentionally owing to translation norms, requirements of the translation commission or the translator's own attitudes towards the source text subject. The analysis of Finnish translations of English magazine articles made by translation students focused on explicitating and implicitating translation strategies. Implicitation was found to be much more frequent than explicitation. Explicitation included, for instance, replacing a source-text nominalisation with a Finnish verb phrase and making clausal relations more explicit by adding connectives to the texts. Implicitation involved turning verb phrases into nominalisations and complete relative clauses into complex premodified noun phrases. These strategies changed the viewpoints and occasionally even modified the opinions expressed by the source-text writers. The students' non-systematic application of opposite strategies suggests that source text manipulation was mainly caused by insufficient skills and knowledge rather than ideological motivations.

Explicitation and Implicitation in Legal Translation – A Process Study of Trainee Translators

“…Klaudy and Károly (2005) and Pápai (2004). Explicitation has also been considered in the context of the strategies used by both non-professional and professional translators (Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996;Puurtinen 2003;Dimitrova 2005a and b). Implicitation seems to be a less frequent procedure (Klaudy and Károly 2005).…”

Translational Shifts of Syntactic and Lexical Markers of Ideology: Reporting the Iraqi Conflict in Polish Reprint Press

“…Such views on the term ideology, adopted for the purpose of CDA-oriented research and much favoured by other translation researchers, form the basis of Puurtinen's (2003) understanding of this notion. In her research into linguistic realisations of ideology, Puurtinen uses ideology as the umbrella term for three phenomena.…”

“…Obviously, the reverse transformation, i.e., substituting nominal constructions with verbal ones (denominalisation), which is an instance of disambiguating grammatical metaphors, also carries a potential of ideological manipulation (see Gumul 2006b;Gumul and Łyda 2010). It makes process participants visible in the sentence and reduces the experiential distance, i.e., distance between text and the reality which it portrays (Puurtinen 2003).…”

“…This phenomenon also attracted considerable attention in the Translation Studies community, giving rise to, among others, a number of CDA-oriented studies in the field of translation (e.g., Hatim and Mason 1997;Puurtinen 2000Puurtinen , 2003Schäffner 2003;Kemppanen 2004;Sidiropoulou 2004).…”

Explicitation of Personal Pronoun Subject in Chinese EFL Majors’ Translation: A Case Study of Translation Universals Based on PACCEL-W

“…However, approaches to the subject are heterogeneous. The typical studies related to explicitation are mainly Øverå s (1998), Olohan & Baker(2000), Puurtinen (1998Puurtinen ( , 2003Puurtinen ( , 2004, Wang Kefei(2003), Ke Fei(2005), Kenny(2005) etc.…”