Implicitation in Translation: Empirical evidence for operational asymmetry in translation

Abstract

This study focuses on the notions of explicitation and implicitation in translation and aims to provide empirical evidence for operational asymmetry (Klaudy 2001). Bi-directional (SL=L1→TL=L2 and SL=L2→TL=L1) comparisons show that when explicitation takes place in the L1→L2 direction, implicitation can be observed in the L2→L1 direction. This phenomenon is referred to as symmetric explicitation. It may also happen, however, that when explicitation is carried out in the L1→L2 direction, no implicitation occurs in the L2→L1 direction. This phenomenon is referred to as asymmetric explicitation. It would be logical to suppose that all cases of language-specific explicitation in the L1→L2 direction are symmetrical (i.e., matched by implicitation in the L2→L1 direction), but this does not seem to be the case. The present paper reports on the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate the validity of the asymmetry hypothesis in the translation of reporting verbs in literary texts translated from English into Hungarian and from Hungarian into English. Using the method of two-way qualitative translation analysis, the study demonstrates that translators tend to prefer the more explicit forms to the more implicit ones in both directions and often fail to perform implicitation. The study may thus provide further evidence for the assumption that semantic explicitation is in fact a universal translation strategy.

Eating and drinking seen through translation: A study of food-related translation difficulties and techniques in a parallel corpus of literary texts

“…This would make it possible to check whether generalizations in one direction are counterbalanced or not by specifications in the inverse linguistic combination (cf. the asymmetry hypothesis proposed by Klaudy & Károly 2005;Klaudy 2009). Furthermore, regarding the translation of culinary cultural referents, a comparison of the frequency of techniques used in translations from Spanish and Catalan into English would be interesting.…”

8 Typological differences shining through. The case of phrasal verbs in translated English

“…In the case of normalization and levelling out, Cappelle (2012) has shown that these two reasonable-sounding candidates for universality in translation behaviour make contradictory predictions in the case of phrasal verbs. For another example, apart from the tendency of explicitation, translated language has also been claimed to display implicitation (Klaudy and Károly 2005).…”

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

“…This hypothesis has been further explored by i.a. 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).…”