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This dissertation describes a study on explicitation and implicitation for the language pair German-Dutch based on a product-oriented corpus study of nominal compounds in translated literary and non-literary texts. The literature study showed that in the course of their sixty-year history, explicitation and implicitation were interpreted in different – oft intuitive – ways, due to a missing theory-based definition of both terms, causing studies on the topic to be very heterogeneous and their findings difficult to compare. It was therefore decided to first and foremost limit the scope of explicitation and implicitation to the level of the translation product and to interpret them as translation solutions (Gambier 2009, 2010) that can only be observed when comparing source and target texts (Krüger 2014). Explicitation and implicitation were then redefined within relevance theory (Sperber/Wilson 1995). Relevance theory, introduced in translation studies by Gutt (1991) and further employed in Alves (2010) and Murtisari (2013), was considered to be the most appropriate theoretical framework for explicitation and implicitation, on the one hand because of its cognitive and pragmatic approach, on the other hand because the theory clearly distinguishes between explicit and implicit communicated information. The actual redefinition of explicitation and implicitation was preceded by the fundamental, for translation studies purposes necessary redefinition of explicitness and implicitness. Subsequently, explicitation and implicitation were distinguished from the related translation solutions addition, omission and substitution and the translation studies terms interference, standardization and simplification. These categories were considered to be the results of one overarching strategy, namely the pursuit of successful communication with the target audience by striving for optimal relevance and reducing the risk of communicative breakdown (Pym 2005). This theoretical foundation formed the starting point for the product-oriented study of explicitation and implicitation for the language pair German-Dutch. The focus of the study was on the translations of nominal compounds with a nominal first constituent (NN). The reason for this was twofold. Firstly, NN compounds are semantically rich constructs that combine explicitly communicated information (the constituents of the compound) and implicitly communicated information (the tacit relationship between these constituents). Thus, more explicit and more implicit translations were possible for each NN compound. Secondly, NN compounds are very productive in both languages and can also be translated by means of alternative constructions. The analysis of the morphosyntactic forms of the translations revealed that NN compounds in both translation directions were mainly translated by means of a NN compound. The Dutch target texts nevertheless showed a stronger preference for phrases (adjective phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase…) to NN compounds than the German target texts. The NN compounds and their translations were used to quantitatively examine the relationship between explicitation and implicitation in the German and Dutch target texts of the bidirectional PAND corpus. In this way, the asymmetry between explicitation and implicitation, which is often assumed in the literature and which postulates that explicitation is more common than implicitation (Klaudy/Károly 2005), could be studied for the language pair German-Dutch. Following the example of Becher (2011), two new versions of this asymmetry hypothesis were formulated. The first version postulated a predominance of explicitation over implicitation in both translation directions, the second version assumed a more asymmetric relationship between explicitation and implicitation in non-literary texts compared to literary texts. However, both hypotheses could not be confirmed. As with Van de Velde (2011), a predominance of explicitation was only found in the translation direction German-Dutch; in the translation direction Dutch-German, on the other hand, implicitations were found to outnumber explicitations. The asymmetry in the non-literary texts was less pronounced than the asymmetry in the literary texts. Finally, a conditional inference tree identified the morphosyntactic form of the translation as the most important predictor for explicitation and implicitation. The question why the choice of a certain morphosyntactic form is made, however, yet remains to be answered by process-oriented studies. |
