What it is
A distribution change redistributes the same semantic components over a different number of surface items. In expansion the components carried by one source item are shared out over several target ones; in compression several source items are gathered into fewer. The quantity of meaning is constant. What changes is how thickly it is spread, which is why it shows up first as a discrepancy in word count rather than in content.
Chesterman lists it as S6 and names the two directions expansion and compression. The ancestor is Vinay and Darbelnet's pair dilution and concentration, which describes the same asymmetry as a property of the language systems: what one concentrates in a single unit, the other dilutes across several. Their related notion of étoffement, in which a preposition must be reinforced by a participle or a noun before it can govern at all, is an obligatory instance of the same movement. One terminological caution: Molina and Hurtado Albir, surveying the inventories, report the pair as concentration versus dissolution. That divergence arose in the Spanish-language reception rather than in any difference of substance, and both labelings denote one operation.
The definitional boundary is against information change, where content is added or removed and the reader knows more or less than the source reader. A distribution change leaves the propositional content untouched: nothing becomes recoverable that was not recoverable before. The same test separates linguistic amplification and compression, Molina and Hurtado Albir's names for the corresponding operations, from amplification and reduction proper.
When it applies
- The target lacks a single lexeme covering the source item's components, so the bundle must be unpacked.
- Source morphology packs relations into one word form, as in compounding and agglutination, and the target expresses them analytically.
- The target has a single item where the source is periphrastic, so the wording contracts without loss.
- The target's grammar forces reinforcement of an element that stands alone in the source, which makes the expansion obligatory rather than chosen.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: evlerinizden
- Target: from your houses
- Comment: One Turkish word form carries root, plural, second person plural possessive and ablative case. English distributes the identical components over three items. Nothing is added or lost. The word-count asymmetry in agglutinative pairs is the routine, structural form of this strategy.
DE>EN
- Source: Krankenversicherungsbeitrag
- Target: health insurance contribution
- Comment: German compounding gathers into one word what English spreads over three. Note the limit of the category: where unpacking a compound also forces an overt relational preposition, the operation shades into explicitation, since a relation left implicit becomes visible. Distribution change proper concerns the number of items, not the recoverability of content.
FR>EN
- Source: la lettre adressée au ministre
- Target: the letter to the minister
- Comment: French frequently reinforces a preposition with a participle before it can govern a complement; English carries the same relation with the bare preposition. Read in reverse this is étoffement, which shows the strategy is often obligatory rather than a stylistic option.
EN>ES
- Source: Yes, so what?
- Target: ¿Y?
- Comment: The standard illustration for the compression pole, from Molina and Hurtado Albir. One item carries the whole dismissive question, and the boundary against reduction is propositional rather than quantitative: nothing is dropped, only repacked.
Watch out for
The strategy is easy to identify and easy to over-apply, because in most working pairs one direction is systematically cheaper than the other. Habitual expansion converts a terse source into a discursive one; habitual compression flattens distinctions the source was maintaining.
- Test each instance propositionally. If the reader gains content the operation is amplification, if the reader loses content it is reduction; only an unchanged content inventory makes it a distribution change.
- Watch the drift into explicitation when unpacking dense morphology. The unpacked version may state a relation the source only implied, which is a different decision needing its own justification.
- Where terminology is fixed by a glossary or by statute, expansion can manufacture a term: a defined single-word concept unpacked into a descriptive phrase no longer matches the definition it depends on.
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; see the glossary entries for dilution, concentration and étoffement.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.