What it is
Amplification introduces into the target text information the source did not formulate. Molina and Hurtado Albir define it that way and list the vehicles: explicitation, explicative paraphrase, and the footnote. Their own illustration is the name of a religious observance rendered with an appended clause identifying it as a month of fasting, which is a detail the source expressed by the name alone.
Nida's treatment supplies the working inventory. Among his techniques of adjustment he groups a set of additions and describes their occasions: filling out elliptical expressions, obligatory specification where the target language requires detail the source could omit, additions made necessary by grammatical restructuring, amplification from implicit to explicit status, classifiers, connectives, categories present in the receptor language and absent in the source, and doublets. The list is worth having to hand, because it shows how many amplifications are provoked by the target system rather than chosen.
The contrast with linguistic amplification has to be stated, since the two labels are routinely confused. Linguistic amplification adds wording and no content: the propositions before and after are identical, and only the number of words has changed, which is why Molina and Hurtado Albir associate it with dubbing and consecutive interpreting, where duration and lip movement have to be filled. Amplification adds content. The test is propositional and can be applied by a reviser without reference to intention: if the target reader ends up knowing something that could not be recovered from the source, it is amplification; if the same proposition arrives in more words, it is linguistic amplification.
When it applies
- The source names a culture-specific referent whose identity the target reader cannot be assumed to hold.
- A loan or an acronym is introduced for the first time and must be made intelligible before it can be reused unglossed.
- The target language requires a classifier, a category word or a connective that the source system leaves out.
- Grammatical restructuring has left a gap that only new lexical material fills, which is Nida's addition arising from the restructuring itself.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Yargıtay bozma kararı verdi.
- Target: The Yargıtay, Türkiye's court of cassation, quashed the judgment.
- Comment: The apposition is content the source did not state. The loan is retained, so the reader keeps the string needed to verify anything, and the gloss is given once. On later mentions the loan stands alone and the amplification is not repeated.
FR>EN
- Source: le 14 juillet
- Target: 14 July, the French national holiday
- Comment: The date carries the observance for a French reader and carries nothing for most others. Compare the explicitation boundary: writing "14 July" where the source wrote "le 14" is explicitation, because the month was recoverable; naming the holiday is amplification, because it was not.
DE>EN
- Source: an der Elbe
- Target: on the river Elbe
- Comment: A classifier addition of the kind Nida catalogues. It is small, routine and nonetheless an addition of content: the target text now states a category that the source assumed. Amplifications of this class are the reason the technique cannot be defined by the size of the intervention.
Watch out for
Amplification is the technique most easily mistaken for accuracy. Because the added material is true, it looks like better service to the reader, and the question a reviser will actually ask is a different one: on whose authority does the target text assert this. The answer must be that the addition is inferable from the document itself, or agreed with the client, or marked as the translator's.
- Amplify once. A gloss repeated at every occurrence changes the weight the text gives an item and reads as instruction rather than translation.
- In certified, sworn and legal work, unmarked in-text additions are generally not permitted. The convention is a bracketed translator's note or a footnote, which turns the operation into notes and glosses and leaves the record clean.
- Amplification cannot repair a defective source. The deficiency belongs in a query or a note, and supplying the missing content silently transfers responsibility for it to the translator.
References
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais: méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier. English translation by J. C. Sager & M.-J. Hamel (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Benjamins Translation Library 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill, pp. 226–240, additions at pp. 227–231.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.