The parameter
Some languages allow a clause to stand without an overt subject, the person and number of the missing argument being recoverable from agreement on the verb or from context. Others require a subject in every finite clause and insert a semantically empty one where no participant is available: English it, German es, French il.
The traditional explanation ties the two facts together: rich verb agreement licenses the omission, because the information is already on the verb. It holds for Italian, Spanish, Polish and Turkish, and fails for Japanese and Korean, which have no subject agreement at all yet drop subjects and objects freely. That second type is called radical or discourse pro-drop: agreement is one licensing route, not the condition itself.
The parameter is also not binary. Finnish, Hebrew and Russian omit subjects in some persons or tenses and not others, and the label partial null subject hides much detail. And omission is not impossibility: an overt pronoun in a null-subject language is available but not neutral, the fact that matters most for translation.
How languages vary
- Consistent null subject: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Arabic. Agreement identifies the argument; the pronoun marks contrast.
- Partial null subject: Finnish, Hebrew, Russian, Icelandic, Brazilian Portuguese. Omission is restricted by person, tense or clause.
- No null subject: English, German, French, Dutch, Swedish. A finite clause requires an overt subject, expletive if need be.
- Null objects: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Thai. Objects as well as subjects are routinely absent, with no agreement to recover.
Dryer's WALS chapter 101 samples 711 languages: 437 mark the subject with affixes on the verb, 82 normally require a pronoun in subject position, 61 have a subject pronoun that is often left out, and the remaining 131 place subject pronouns in a different position, use clitics, or mix types. Verbal affixation outnumbers all other types combined. Siewierska's chapter 102 finds person marking of both the agent-like and the patient-like argument in 193 of 378 languages. The English requirement of an overt subject belongs to a group of 82 out of 711: a local habit, not a default.
Consequences for translation
Into a language with no null subject the insertion of a pronoun is obligatory, and it is explicitation with content attached. Person is usually recoverable from the source verb; gender frequently is not. Turkish has no grammatical gender, and a Spanish or Polish third person form may not disambiguate either. English forces a choice among he, she, they and a repeated noun, and in a personal document or a witness statement that choice is a factual claim about a person. Where the document does not settle it, use a repeated noun or a role term, and a note if neither works. A silent guess is not available.
The subtler consequence runs the other way. In a consistent null-subject language an overt pronoun is emphatic or contrastive by default, because the neutral option was to omit it. Translating an emphatic source pronoun as an ordinary English pronoun loses the emphasis, while translating an ordinary null subject as an English pronoun adds none. The loss runs one way only, and compensating takes a cleft or a contrastive adverb rather than a pronoun.
The consequence a reviser or project manager sees is cohesion. In the source, reference is tracked by agreement across a run of clauses with no pronouns. In English that run becomes a chain of pronouns, and where two participants share a gender the chain is ambiguous when the source was not. Rebuilding it with repeated nouns is a cohesion change and it lengthens the text. It also makes stored segments unreliable: a segment whose subject came from the preceding paragraph carries the wrong referent when it is reused elsewhere.
Examples
ES>EN
- Source: Vino ayer y firmó el contrato.
- Target: She came yesterday and signed the contract.
- Comment: The Spanish verb gives third person singular and nothing else. English cannot produce the clause without committing to he, she or they, and in a personal document that commitment states something about the individual.
IT>EN
- Source: Non lo so. / Io non lo so.
- Target: I do not know. / I do not know, whatever the others say.
- Comment: Both clauses are first person singular. The second adds an overt pronoun and with it a contrast. English uses the same pronoun in both, so the contrast is carried elsewhere or it disappears.
JA>EN
- Source: 昨日行きました。
- Target: I went yesterday.
- Comment: Japanese has no subject agreement, and the clause identifies no participant. Only the surrounding discourse and the politeness marking narrow the field. The English subject comes entirely from context, so it can be supplied wrongly and read perfectly.
References
- Dryer, M. S. (2013). "Expression of Pronominal Subjects." In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 101. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Siewierska, A. (2013). "Verbal Person Marking." In WALS Online, chapter 102.
- Siewierska, A. (2004). Person. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Huang, Y. (2000). Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Velupillai, V. (2012). An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.