Article published in:
Target
Vol. 26:3 (2014) ► pp. 361–384

A multifactorial analysis of explicitation in translation

| Utrecht University
| University of Geneva
The search for translation universals has been an important topic in translation studies over the past decades. In this paper, we focus on the notion of explicitation through a multifaceted study of causal connectives, integrating four different variables: the role of the source and the target languages, the influence of specific connectives and the role of the discourse relation they convey. Our results indicate that while source and target languages do not globally influence explicitation, specific connectives have a significant impact on this phenomenon. We also show that in English and French, the most frequently used connectives for explicitation share a similar semantic profile. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitation also varies across different discourse relations, even when they are conveyed by a single connective.
Keywords: translation universals, explicitation, discourse connectives, causality, corpus-based translation studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Causal connectives as indicators of explicitation
  • 3.Corpus data
    • 3.1The Europarl corpus
    • 3.2Counting and categorizing causal connectives in directional corpora
  • 4.The influence of the source language
  • 5.The influence of the target language
  • 6.The role of specific connectives
  • 7.The role of discourse relations
  • 8.General discussion
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.26.3.02zuf
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