Explicitation

What it is

Explicitation makes overt in the target text something the source left implicit but recoverable: a grammatical relation the source encoded in morphology, a logical connection the source left to juxtaposition, a referent the source left to context. Nothing is added that a competent source reader did not already have. What changes is whether the information is on the surface.

Vinay and Darbelnet named the procedure and its converse, implicitation, as a pair. Blum-Kulka reframed it in 1986 as a research question rather than a procedure, proposing that explicitation may be a feature of the translation process itself and not merely a response to differences between two language systems. Klaudy provided the classification that is now standard, and it has four types. Obligatory explicitation is forced by semantic and syntactic differences between the languages: without it the target sentence is ungrammatical. Optional explicitation is driven by text-building preferences and stylistic norms: the target sentence would be grammatical without it, but not idiomatic. Pragmatic explicitation is driven by cultural asymmetry, where the target reader lacks background knowledge the source reader had. Translation-inherent explicitation is attributed to the nature of the mediating process itself, independently of the languages and cultures involved.

The fourth type is contested and should be cited as such. It presupposes Blum-Kulka's explicitation hypothesis, and Becher, among others, has argued that it is unfalsifiable as stated: any instance offered as translation-inherent can be reassigned to one of the first three types, and no procedure is specified for deciding when that reassignment fails.

Chesterman groups explicitation and implicitation together as Pr2 and treats the pair as one adjustable setting rather than two separate operations.

When it applies

• The target grammar requires a category the source does not mark: number, gender, definiteness, tense sequence, subject.
• The source links propositions by juxtaposition or by a light particle, and the target convention expects an overt connective.
• A referent recoverable from the source situation is not recoverable from the target text alone: an acronym, an institution, an anaphor at distance.
• The target register habitually spells relations out, as English technical and legal drafting does.

Examples

TR>EN

• Source: kardeşim
• Target: my brother
• Comment: Obligatory in the strict sense that English has no unmarked term in the ordinary register. Turkish leaves sex unspecified and English forces a choice, which means the explicitation is compulsory and, where the document does not establish the sex, unwarranted. "My sibling" preserves the source indeterminacy at the cost of register, and in official documents that is the correct trade.

DE>EN

• Source: Der Antrag wurde abgelehnt; die Frist war abgelaufen.
• Target: The application was refused because the deadline had passed.
• Comment: Optional explicitation. The causal relation is present in the German by juxtaposition and inference; English prose of this register normally makes it overt. Nothing has been added, but a relation the source left the reader to draw is now asserted by the text.

NL>EN

• Source: de Tweede Kamer
• Target: the Dutch House of Representatives
• Comment: Pragmatic explicitation. "The Second Chamber" is accurate and uninformative outside the Netherlands. The nationality and the chamber's place in the system were recoverable to the source reader from general knowledge, and the target text supplies what that knowledge supplied.

Watch out for

The line that matters in professional work is the one between explicitation and information change. Explicitation surfaces what was recoverable; information change introduces what was not. If the added material could only have come from the translator's research, from a parallel document or from an assumption about the facts, it is not explicitation, whatever it looks like.

• Explicitation is not neutral in binding text. Making a causal or conditional relation overt fixes one reading of a sentence that the source left open, and in contracts and legislation that ambiguity is sometimes deliberate.
• Optional explicitation accumulates. Individually defensible additions produce a target text measurably more explicit than the source across a document, which is the observation the explicitation hypothesis was built on.
• Where the source is genuinely ambiguous, the decision belongs on the record.

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). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Blum-Kulka, S. (1986). "Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation." In J. House & S. Blum-Kulka (eds), Interlingual and Intercultural Communication. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, pp. 17–35.
• Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.
• Klaudy, K. (1998/2009). "Explicitation." In M. Baker (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge; 2nd edition, edited by M. Baker & G. Saldanha, 2009, pp. 104–108.
• Becher, V. (2010). "Abandoning the Notion of 'Translation-Inherent' Explicitation: Against a Dogma of Translation Studies." Across Languages and Cultures 11(1), 1–28.