Lexical Explicitation and Implicitation in Experts’ and Students’ Literary Translations: An Empirical Contrastive Study

Abstract

This paper explores the interdependence between the application of the key strategies of explicitation and implicitation on the one hand, and translation competence on the other. The discussion focuses on the empirical findings from two corpora based on data excerpted from undergraduate students’ and experienced professionals’ translations of literary source texts. Two working hypotheses have been tested: first, whether there is a correlation between the number of lexical explicitation and implicitation shifts and translators’ level of expertise and second, whether there are any substantial differences between novices’ and experts’ models of translation.
Finally, the article argues that the investigation of explicitation and implicitation provides important insights into the characteristics of both translation process and product and can suggest novel proposals for the agenda of translation pedagogy.