When and why do translators add connectives?
A corpus-based study
Viktor Becher | Universität Hamburg
Additions and omissions of connectives (e.g. conjunctions, connective adverbs, etc.) are a frequent phenomenon in translation. The present article reports on a study whose aim was to elucidate translators’ motivations for performing such shifts, focusing on the addition of connectives. The study was carried out on a bidirectional parallel corpus containing translations of business texts between English and German. Connective additions and omissions were identified, counted and analyzed taking into account the surrounding linguistic context of the shift in question, possibly associated shifts performed by the translator, alternative translation options, etc. It was found that the vast majority of identified shifts were attributable to previously established English-German contrasts in terms of syntax, lexis, and communicative norms. The findings suggest that it is unnecessary to assume that translators follow a “universal strategy” of explicitation, as it has often been done in the literature (cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis).
Keywords: explicitation, implicitation, connective, addition, omission, shift, translation universals
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A very brief (and very critical) overview of previous research on explicitation
- 3.Study aim, data, method, and object of investigation
- 4.Quantitative results
- 5.Qualitative Results
- 5.1Complying with communicative norms
- 5.2Exploiting features of the target language system
- 5.3Dealing with restrictions of the target language system
- 5.4Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression
- 5.5Optimizing the cohesion of the target text
- 6.Putting everything together
- 7.The bottom Line
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 10 August 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.23.1.02bec
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.23.1.02bec
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