What it is
Implicitation entrusts to the target language's grammar, or to the situation, something the source stated overtly. A pronoun disappears into verbal morphology; a possessive disappears because the target language treats body parts and kin as possessed by default; a classifier disappears because the target noun already carries its category. The proposition is unchanged and remains fully recoverable by a competent target reader.
Vinay and Darbelnet defined it as the converse of explicitation, and Chesterman treats the two together as one setting, Pr2. Klaudy's classification of explicitation transfers to it directly: implicitation may be obligatory, where retaining the source element would be ungrammatical or intolerably redundant in the target; optional, where the target norm prefers the leaner form; or pragmatic, where the target reader shares knowledge the source reader had to be given.
The interesting claim about implicitation is a negative one. Klaudy's asymmetry hypothesis holds that explicitations performed in one translation direction are not systematically counterbalanced by corresponding implicitations in the opposite direction: where translators have a genuine choice between the two operations, they prefer to explicitate, and the implicitations that would restore the balance are frequently not carried out. The hypothesis is testable precisely because it excludes obligatory cases, which are dictated by the language systems and settle nothing. The dating varies in the literature. It is cited to 2001, 2003 and 2005 depending on which formulation an author has in hand, and the first full empirical statement in English is Klaudy and Károly's 2005 study of reporting verbs in a Hungarian and English corpus.
When it applies
- The target language encodes grammatically what the source expressed lexically: person and number in the verb, definiteness in case, aspect in the stem.
- The source repeats a noun phrase that the target convention would pronominalize or drop.
- The source carries a classifier or a category word that the target noun makes redundant.
- The target reader is inside the culture the source was explaining, so a gloss the source contained is now noise.
Examples
EN>TR
- Source: I will call you tomorrow.
- Target: Yarın ararım.
- Comment: Obligatory in effect. Person is carried by the verbal suffix and the object is retrievable from the situation, so both pronouns go. Retaining them is grammatical but emphatic, which would introduce a contrast the English did not make.
EN>ES
- Source: He raised his hand.
- Target: Levantó la mano.
- Comment: Spanish marks the possessor of a body part by the definite article, and the subject by the verb ending. Two overt items in the source correspond to none in the target, with no loss: "levantó su mano" is understandable and marks the possession as unexpected.
EN>DE
- Source: in the month of May
- Target: im Mai
- Comment: The category word is redundant because the target reader cannot take "Mai" for anything but a month. This is the implicitation that translators do perform, since retaining the classifier would be conspicuous; the cases the asymmetry hypothesis is about are the optional ones, where retaining the explicit form is merely unremarkable.
Watch out for
Implicitation is judged by recoverability, and recoverability is a claim about a reader. The test is not whether the translator can reconstruct the omitted element, but whether an ordinary target reader with no access to the source can. Where the answer is no, the operation is reduction, and reduction is a different technique with a different justification.
- The asymmetry hypothesis is a description of what translators do, not a norm authorizing them to do it. It is equally an argument for looking hard at every optional explicitation before accepting it.
- In official and legal work, elements that look redundant frequently are not. Repeated party names, restated dates and repeated defined terms are drafting conventions that guard against ambiguity, and thinning them out is a substantive edit.
- Implicitation compounds with the target language's own defaults. Dropping a subject in a pro-drop language is invisible; dropping the same subject where the passage has more than one available antecedent creates an ambiguity the source did not contain.
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.
- 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.
- Klaudy, K. & Károly, K. (2005). "Implicitation in Translation: Empirical Evidence for Operational Asymmetry in Translation." Across Languages and Cultures 6(1), 13–28.