Explicitation and Implicitaion in Translation: Towards a Heuristic for Investigating Translation Competence

Abstract

The paper seeks to further investigate students’ and experts’ explicitation / implicitation behavior by providing empirical evidence on the issue. The research paradigm, while still anchored in translation studies and cognitive linguistics, is extended to include the perspective of lexical typology as well. It is argued that the typological perspective can yield considerable insight into Bulgarian-English cross-lingual transformations, the two languages traditionally being described in terms of their high degree of analyticity and dubbed as ‘markante Sprachen’ within the Slavic and Germanic families. Also, as typology shares with cognitive linguistics an inherent interest in universal phenomena, explicitation, being quintessentially defined as a translation universal, is an excellent candidate for such an approach. In line with the “universalist” approach, explicitation is construed as a strategy of simplification, which facilitates communication in situations of natural and artificial bilingualism where semantically opaque words and meanings in the source language are analytically decomposed into more primitive and transparent discrete units in the target language. In contrast, implicitation is understood as a synthetic fusion of source text semantic components and words into single target text lexemes. Essentially, explicitation is a one-to-many relationship manifested in periphrastic expansion / addition of lexemes and implicitation is a many-to-one relationship as a result of semantic ellipsis and / or omission. In focusing on lexical variation, the study takes the conventional analytical / synthetic division beyond its initial grammatical bias towards establishing some important parameters of Bulgarian and English lexical typological profiles.
The corpus features lexical data from 144 English-Bulgarian translations of three 1,000-word excerpts from contemporary English novels accomplished by three experts and forty-five students. The results suggest a marked disparity between experienced and inexperienced translators’ strategic competence as evidenced by the lexical variation due to explicitation and implicitation effects. Overall, the present findings appear to confirm the hypotheses that explicitation shifts prevail in both students’ and experts’ production, and that students in general tend to avoid implicitation.