What it is
Particularization replaces a source term with one that sits below it in the same semantic field. The target names a species where the source named the genus, and the reader of the translation therefore learns something the reader of the source had to infer, or was never told at all. It is the converse of generalization and is described by the same authors in the same breath.
Vinay and Darbelnet treated the two directions together, and Molina and Hurtado Albir list particularization as a separate technique, illustrating it with English "window" answered by French guichet. Chesterman covers both directions under S3, hyponymy. The literature is consistent that the two moves are symmetrical as operations; professionally they are not, because their failure modes point in opposite directions. Generalization costs information the source supplied. Particularization supplies information the source did not.
Two neighbours need to be kept apart from it. Explicitation makes overt what is recoverable from the source text or its situation; particularization that is not recoverable adds content, and belongs with information change rather than with explicitation. Abstraction change, meanwhile, moves along a scale of concreteness without any taxonomic relation between the two items; here the target term is a kind of the source term, and the relation is a genuine hyponymy.
When it applies
- The target language forces a distinction the source language does not make, so no rendering at the source's level of generality exists.
- The referent is fixed and recoverable from the immediate context, and the target term names exactly that referent and nothing more.
- The source term is a generic used by convention where the target language uses the specific term, as in trade names, official designations and standing formulae.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: He went to the window to collect his ticket.
- Target: Il s'est présenté au guichet pour retirer son billet.
- Comment: The standard illustration, running in the direction opposite to generalization. French has no term covering the whole English range, so the translator must choose, and the sentence itself supplies the evidence for choosing: a ticket is collected at a counter position.
EN>TR
- Source: his brother-in-law
- Target: kayınbirader, enişte or bacanak
- Comment: The clearest case of the constraint. Turkish requires the exact affinal relation, and the English term covers three of them. Where the source document does not establish which relation holds, no target term is available that says only what the source said, and the choice has to be evidenced from the document or raised as a query rather than settled by probability.
EN>NL
- Source: Put the file on the desk.
- Target: Leg het dossier op het bureau.
- Comment: Dutch distinguishes placing something flat from setting it upright, so the general English verb has no direct counterpart. This is obligatory particularization driven by the target grammar and lexicon: the distinction is a property of Dutch, and no reader takes it as a claim about the file.
Watch out for
The professional risk is easy to state and easy to miss in practice. Specifying beyond what the source warrants is an addition of information disguised as a lexical choice. It does not look like an addition, because nothing has been inserted and the sentence is no longer than the original; the extra content sits inside the chosen word.
- Separate the obligatory case from the optional one. Where the target system forces a choice, the choice must be evidenced from the document or from the situation the document describes. Where nothing forces it, the general term is the faithful one.
- In witness statements, medical reports and identity or civil status documents, an unwarranted specific term produces an assertion the source never made, and the source is no longer available to correct it.
- Where the evidence is absent and the target grammar leaves no neutral option, record the difficulty rather than resolving it silently. A query costs less than a document that says more than it should.
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, pp. 30–39.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.