What it is
Two parts of a text stand in a relation: one gives the reason for the other, one qualifies it, one is an alternative to it. A connective is the word or short phrase marking which relation it is. It carries no content of its own and is not required: the relation holds whether or not anything marks it, and a reader recovers an unmarked one by inference.
Connectives come from several word classes at once, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, adverbs and some prepositions, so no list of them is a grammatical category and no source consulted here treats the inventory as closed. What holds the class together is the job it does.
Two boundaries, the first the sharper. The record on complex prepositions keeps that multi-word class as a lexical unit and its distribution across legislative and judicial genres; this one keeps the relation between two parts of a text and what happens to its marking in translation. The second is softer: a word can mark a tie and tell the reader how to take what follows, and where it does, the tie is this record's and the instruction is metadiscourse.
Where the fixity comes from
Nothing prescribes a connective. The evidence here is unusual in one respect: it runs in both directions at once, which is what turns direction from an impression into a measurement.
- Yung and colleagues annotated a parallel corpus of European Parliament proceedings both ways, 33 sittings, 171,000 tokens of English with their German translations and 95,000 tokens of German with their English translations. Translating into German adds connectives more often than it removes them, 26.1 per cent against 13.8; translating into English removes more often than it adds, 21.6 against 12.3. Their own conclusion is that explicitation is not a general phenomenon.
- The percentages stay where they were measured. The corpus is parliamentary proceedings, no comparable figure was found for legislative text, and a rate taken from speeches carries neither its genre nor its pair with it.
- Zufferey and Degand supply the reason the counts come out uneven at all: exact translation equivalents mostly do not exist, because two connectives expressing a similar relation differ in meaning, in the syntax they permit and in register. They report the English and carrying eleven functions in speech against four in writing.
Consequences for translation
What has to survive is the relation. The word marking it is one way of carrying it, and not always the target's.
- A connective added where the source marked none decides a reading the source left open, and in a binding text that is a change of substance. Dropping one is the mirror image, available where the target marks the relation by other means.
- A direction claim needs a real direction: two equally authentic versions have no source between them, so nothing was added or removed, and calling their difference explicitation is wrong rather than imprecise. A tendency measured over a corpus settles no individual case either, and says nothing about this relation in this sentence.
- A reviser can flag a connective the target genre does not use, and only as unidiomatic. Where it names a different relation from the one the other version carries, that is a finding.
- The semicolon closing a listed item and the line break isolating the connective are notation, a conventions matter cited here because it is what makes the marking visible. The word stays here.
Examples
FR>DE
- Source: ... ne peut être effectué que si: a) la personne concernée a indubitablement donné son consentement ... ou ... b) il est nécessaire ...
- Target: ... lediglich erfolgen darf, wenn eine der folgenden Voraussetzungen ...: a) Die betroffene Person hat ... ihre Einwilligung gegeben; b) die Verarbeitung ist erforderlich ...
- Comment: Directive 95/46/EC, Article 7. Six grounds, one disjunctive relation. The French prints ou five times, each on a line of its own between the lettered grounds; the German prints it not once and states the relation in the opening line instead. Same relation, and the marking is optional in the plainest sense.
DE>NL
- Source: Die Mitgliedstaaten sehen vor, daß die Verarbeitung personenbezogener Daten lediglich erfolgen darf, wenn eine der folgenden Voraussetzungen ...
- Target: De Lid-Staten bepalen dat de verwerking ... slechts mag geschieden indien: a) de betrokkene daarvoor zijn ondubbelzinnige toestemming heeft verleend, of b) ...
- Comment: The same provision the other way round: now the Dutch has five connectives the German does not print, where a moment ago five were disappearing. Both descriptions are of the same equally authentic versions, between which there is no source and so no direction, which is what the percentages above have and this pair has not.
References
- Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
- Yung, F., Scholman, M. C. J., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Pollkläsener, C. and Demberg, V. (2023). "Investigating explicitation of discourse connectives in translation using automatic annotations." In Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. ACL Anthology 2023.sigdial-1.2.
- Zufferey, S. and Degand, L. (2024). Connectives and Discourse Relations. Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chapter 1, 1 to 22, and chapter 7, 142 to 162.
- Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, Article 7, French, German, Dutch and English language versions.