What it is
In a level shift, an item expressed by grammar in the source is expressed by lexis in the target, or the reverse. A suffix becomes an adverb; a tense distinction becomes a phrase; a periphrastic construction becomes a single word of ordinary vocabulary. The content is carried across; the level of the language system that carries it is not the same on both sides.
Catford defined the category within a four-level model of language: phonology, graphology, grammar and lexis. He then narrowed its scope himself, arguing that translation equivalence cannot hold between phonology or graphology on one side and grammar or lexis on the other, since those levels are not related by shared content. What remains operative, and what the term means in practice, is the grammar-to-lexis exchange in either direction. His standard illustration is Slavic verbal aspect: a category marked in the Russian verb and rendered in English by lexical means such as an adverb or a periphrasis of the "used to" type. Chesterman preserves the category as his syntactic strategy G9 without substantive change.
The boundary against explicitation is worth holding firmly. A level shift is forced by the absence of the category in the target system, which is why the constraint here is obligatory: the translator has no option of marking evidentiality on an English verb. Explicitation is a choice to make overt what the source left implicit but recoverable. The two look alike in the finished text because both produce a target that spells something out, and only the analysis of the source system tells them apart.
When it applies
- The source has a grammatical category the target lacks altogether: evidentiality, aspect as a systematic opposition, honorific marking, dual number.
- A productive morphological resource, such as a diminutive, augmentative or causative affix, has no target morphological counterpart.
- A grammaticalized periphrasis, such as a recent-past or prospective construction, corresponds to a target adverb rather than to a target construction.
- The reverse direction, where a source lexical item is absorbed into a target grammatical form, which is rarer and easily missed.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Gelmiş.
- Target: Apparently he came.
- Comment: Turkish marks evidentiality in the verb: the suffix reports the event as known indirectly. English has no such category and must use an adverb or a reporting phrase. Note the weight problem: a suffix that recurs on every verb of a Turkish narrative cannot be rendered by an adverb on every English verb without producing a text that reads as relentlessly hedged.
FR>EN
- Source: Je viens de signer le contrat.
- Target: I have just signed the contract.
- Comment: The recent past is a construction in French and an adverb in English. Nothing is added or lost, and no other rendering is available, which makes this a clean obligatory case.
ES>EN
- Source: Espérame un momentito.
- Target: Wait for me just a moment.
- Comment: The Spanish diminutive here attenuates rather than measures: it softens the request instead of describing a shorter interval. English has no productive diminutive morphology and carries the attenuation lexically.
Watch out for
Lexical renderings are heavier and more explicit than the grammatical marking they replace, and the difference accumulates. A category that is unobtrusive because it is affixal in the source becomes conspicuous when it is spelled out in every sentence of the target, and the register drifts.
The opposite failure is silent loss. Where a category has no target counterpart and the lexical rendering is awkward, translators routinely leave it unrendered, and the omission is invisible in a target-only read. This matters most where the category is legally or evidentially loaded: an evidential suffix in a witness statement marks the difference between what the speaker saw and what the speaker was told, and flattening it removes information a court may need. The defensible practice is to render the category where it is contrastive, let it lapse where it is merely routine, and record which policy was applied.
References
- Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 73–75.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.