What it is
An information change either adds material that is not present in the source and not derivable from it, or withholds material the source carries because the translator judges it irrelevant to the target reader. The operation is directed at the reader's state of knowledge rather than at the wording, and it takes effect at clause level or across a whole text.
Chesterman lists it as Pr3 among the pragmatic strategies, the group he describes as manipulating the message itself rather than its linguistic realization. He is careful about the pairing: addition here means new information, and omission here means information deliberately left out as not relevant. Both halves rest on an assessment of what the target audience needs, which is why the strategy sits with the pragmatic group and not with the semantic shifts.
The boundary against explicitation is the whole definitional point of the category, and it is a boundary of recoverability rather than of length. An explicitation makes overt something a competent source reader already had: implicit in the grammar, retrievable from the context, or supplied by the shared background the source assumed. An information change supplies something no reader of the source could have retrieved from it. If the added material came from a parallel document, from the file, from research or from an assumption about the facts, the operation is Pr3 no matter how small it looks on the page.
When it applies
- The target readership lacks a fact the source nowhere states and its own audience did not need: a currency, a jurisdiction, a contextually obvious date.
- The brief defines a different communicative purpose, so a passage serving the source situation has no addressee in the target situation.
- The source contains an evident factual or internal error and the commissioner has decided how it is to be handled.
- Material is being repurposed rather than reproduced: house publications, marketing copy, instructions localized for another market.
Examples
DE>EN
- Source: Weitere Auskünfte erteilt Ihnen unser Kundendienst.
- Target: Further information is available from our customer service team, which is open on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Comment: The opening hours are accurate, useful and nowhere in the source. No source reader could have recovered them from the text, which is what separates the operation from explicitation. The addition is legitimate only if someone with authority over the content has approved it.
TR>EN
- Source: 5237 sayılı Kanunun 52 nci maddesi uyarınca
- Target: under Article 53 of Law no. 5237
- Comment: The source cites an article that the surrounding reasoning shows cannot be the one meant. Correcting the citation silently substitutes the translator's reading of the statute for the author's statement, and it removes the reader's ability to see that the source said something else. Where the correction is right it is still an information change; where it is wrong it is irreversible.
NL>EN
- Source: Bij klachten kunt u terecht bij de Geschillencommissie.
- Target: [omitted]
- Comment: The Dutch disputes body has jurisdiction only over traders bound to it, so the sentence sends a reader abroad to a forum that cannot hear the complaint. Omission is defensible where the brief establishes a different readership. In a document that has to stand as a record of the source, the same omission is an error rather than a strategy.
Watch out for
Information change is the point at which translating turns into writing. The translator who adds a fact takes responsibility for it, and the translator who removes one takes responsibility for its absence. Neither responsibility belongs to the translator unless the brief has delegated it.
- In certified, sworn and legal work the strategy is not available. The target text is offered as a complete rendering of a specific document, and additions belong in a marked translator's note, outside the body of the text.
- Delisle treats unjustified omission as an error rather than a procedure, and the same reasoning applies to unjustified addition. What makes either a technique is the mandate behind it.
- Additions are not neutral even when correct. Supplying a date, an amount or an authority resolves questions the source left open, and in disputed documents those questions may be the matter at issue.
References
- 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.
- Delisle, J. (1993). La traduction raisonnée: manuel d'initiation à la traduction professionnelle de l'anglais vers le français. Ottawa: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa.