Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus

Abstract

Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables to be investigated. The two terms — and their usage by other scholars — will be discussed. An electronic corpus will then be described which provides the empirical data and techniques for information extraction. For the investigation carried out using our corpus, indicators will then be derived on the basis of which operationalizations and hypotheses can be formulated for patterns of explicitation occurring between source and target texts. Some initial results relating to cohesive explicitness and explicitation in the data will be presented and discussed, with particular attention being paid to the areas of ‘reference’, ‘substitution‘, ‘ellipsis’, ‘conjunction’, and ‘lexical cohesion’. First attempts will also be made at explaining the findings.