Explicitation and implicitation in translation: Combining comparable and parallel corpus methodologies

Abstract

This paper studies explicitation and implicitation in translated medical texts using a combination of comparable and parallel corpus methodologies. Previous corpus research in this domain has shown common lexical and syntactic shifts between translated and non-translated texts (Askehave & Zethsen 2000; Jensen & Zethsen 2012), including differences in explicitation rates surrounding Latin-Greek (LG) terms (Jiménez-Crespo & Tercedor 2017). A parallel corpus section was compiled in order to identify whether the observed higher explicitation ratios in English to Spanish translations when compared to similar non-translated texts in this last study are due to (1) cross-linguistic interference or replication of source text structures, or (2) to the translational tendency to explicitate. The results point to a possible combination of both, with 21% of cases of explicitation and no implicitation. Higher explicitation ratios mainly support the interference or cross-linguistic influence hypothesis (Kruger 2018). This study also offers support for the risk aversion hypothesis (Pym 2005, 2015; Kruger 2018; De Sutter & Kruger 2018), as translations only show a tendency to include clearer and more explicit formulations.