Introduction
In her book Evidence of
Explicitation in Texts Translated from English into Korean: A Corpus-based
Pilot Study, Kim, Soonyoung describes evidences of explicitation in texts
using a small parallel corpus of student and professional translations. The
purpose of this study is to validate explicitation as a feature of translated
texts. The author confirms the existence of explicitation in texts translated
from English into Korean. She also endorses that text differences in type and
in degree can have different impact on explicitation.
Explicitation
Explicitation is the process of taking what is implicit in a source text
and making it explicit in a target text. The explicitation hypothesis was
presented for the first time by Blum-Kulka (1986). She shows that shifts in the
forms of cohesive markers go with shifts in the levels of explicitness and assumes
that explicitation is inherent in translation. Laviosa-Braithwaite (1995) says
the use of reported that is an aspect
of explicitation at the syntactic level. Her hypotheses are as follows: that appears more often in the target
language than in the source language; that
appears more often in texts produced by non-professionals than in texts by professionals.
This leads her to conclude that the differences between non-professionals and
professionals are related to the factors such as a better understanding of
translation process and translation texts, and the translator’s ability of
handling texts.
According to Klaudy (2001), there are four different explicitations:
obligatory, optional, pragmatic, and translation-inherent. Obligatory explicitation
is due to differences between the source and target linguistic systems;
optional explicitation is cause by differences in style preferences; pragmatic
explicitation is triggered by differences between the cultures of target and
source language communities; and translation-inherent explicitation is caused
by the language-independent attributes of translation.
Data and Methodology
The focus of the author is on obligatory and pragmatic explicitations.
Her assumptions are that translations of both students and professional will
show explicitation and that there will be differences in the level of explicitation
between their translations. Three sentences containing free modifier sentences
(adjective phrases modifying NPs) and three expressions which contain cultural
information (two metonyms and one cultural expression) are studied for the
obligatory explicitation and pragmatic explicitations respectively.
There were twenty student translators in their first year of graduate
school and one professional translator with six years of field experience. The
text that the author used for the present study was a text translated from
German to English. According to the author, the quality was high enough to
consider it a text as it was already officially published. The students were
given one week of time to translate 5,000 words using all the resources whereas
the professional translator had approximately three days to translate the same
text.
Result and Analysis
In the students’ translations, fifteen out of twenty texts (75%) had
explicitation of a phrase with modifier located in the middle of the sentence, proud
and unapproachable. Eight out of twenty texts (40%) had explicitation
of a phrase with modifier located in sentence-final position, composed
and imposing. Fourteen out of twenty texts (70%) had explicitation of a
phrase with modifier located in sentence-initial position, captivated. When it comes
to translating cultural specific texts, only five of the twenty students (25%) showed
extra information about the cultural specific word Stuttgart and six of
twenty (35%), Serengeti. However, when they were translating another cultural
specific word, Formula 1 drivers, twelve of the twenty students (60%) incorporated
extra information. This is due to the fact that the students thought that Formula 1 drivers was more cultural than
the place names. However, the professional translator incorporated external
information for both, place names and Formula 1 drivers, to make them
understandable. This shows that the professional translator is more capable of filling
the culture gaps.
In terms of length of the translations, there was a noticeable
difference. The student translators used slightly fewer words than the
professional, indicating a possible difference in the level of explicitation.
In conclusion, both the students and the professional translator showed
evidence of explicitation. However, students showed less consistency in
pragmatic explicitation. The findings of this paper support the idea of
explicitation as a common feature of translated texts.
Critique
The author chose an interesting research subject. However, I believe it
would have been better to have more resources to obtain more data. The study
lacks accuracy and depth, in particular, in terms of collection of data and
methodology. For instance, the number of student and professional translators
is clearly unbalanced. The author justifies this point admitting that it was
hard for her to hire more than one professional translator, and that it would
have been more recommendable to survey the same number of professional and
non-professional translators.
There are some parts in her work where, I believe, more accuracy would
have been better for a more reliable study. For instance, when she shows the
student translations, she adds ‘rough’ back-translations of the phrases in
question (ibid.: 149). The author also assumes the necessity of studying with
more tests before making any generalization of the impact of the modifier’s
location for evidence of explicitation in translated texts (ibid.: 153). It
would be another interesting research subject for a future project to observe
if the location of the modifier - whether it is in the beginning, in the
middle, or at the end of the sentence - could have influence on the evidence of
explicitation.
The overall layout of the text is pleasant. The author makes important
texts bold to highlight three sentences containing three free modifier phrases,
two toponyms, and one cultural expression. She also appropriately uses a table
with the number of words and letters to explain a possible correlation between
the student translations and the professional translation. However, if she had mentioned
(1a), (2a), (3a) one more time before presenting the professional translator’s
translations (ibid.: 155), the reader would haven’t needed to go back to the previous
pages to look for the ST. When it comes to the table for comparisons of word
counts, the author uses only five student translations, randomly selected,
instead of the total twenty translations. Her approach to simplify the process
might not be really convincing to critical readers.
If I were going to carry out research on explicitation using the same
source, I would focus more on analyzing the student translations for the text used
in pragmatic explicitation regarding two place names (ibid.: 158). Rather than
stopping at the point where the author concludes that the ratio of the number
of students showing explicitation for place names is quite low compared with
the ration for obligatory explicitation, I would go further to see whether the
students who showed explicitation for one place name also show explicitation
for the other place name. For instance, in TT11, the student translates Stuttgart and the Serengeti 슈트트가르트 동물원and 세렝게티, the Stuttgart zoo and the Serengeti and, in TT19,
the student translates 슈투트
가르트 and 세렌게티 야생 동물 보호구, Stuttgart and Serengeti Wildlife Reserve. In other
words, the student from TT11 does not show explicitation for the Serengeti and
the student TT19 does not show explicitation for Stuttgart.
Conclusion
Since, among the translated texts, the author found that the surveyed professional
and non-professional translators conveyed the same message using different ways
to express it, she was able to prove the existence of explicitation. The author
also highlighted some degree of explicitation between the student and the professional
translators, which could be easily foreseen due to the translators’ skills.
Given exactly the same message presented under exactly identical
conditions at the same point in time, individuals sharing the same mother
tongue tend to write different sentences to express it.[1]
(Gile 1995:52)
However, to make a more completed and reliable study, it would have been
advisable if the author had increased the number of translations of the students
and the professionals. Besides, another point to consider is the constraints of
the students’ translations. It could have been interesting if the author had
had some a posteriori feedback from the students to extract additional
conclusions. Unlike the professional translator, who had a tight but relatively
feasible time frame to submit the translation for which he/she was paid, the
students were given one week of time to get the translation done. Can the
author assure that the task was performed under identical conditions? How much
time each of the students actually dedicated to the translation during the
given time? Were the students’ translations carried out during an exam period? I
therefore think that conducting a questionnaire survey could have been a good
way to learn about the environment in which the student and professional
translators conducted the task.
[1] Elisa Perego (2003). Evidence
of Explicitation in Subtitling: Towards a Categorisation. Across Languages and Cultures 4 (1)
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