What it is
Reduction suppresses an information item present in the source, wholly or in part. The item may be a word, a modifier, a clause or a discourse signal. What defines the technique is that something the source states does not appear in the target. Molina and Hurtado Albir use the label as an umbrella covering the whole family of suppressive operations, so that implicitation, concision and outright omission all fall inside it.
Nida approached the same territory from the practitioner's side and catalogued what translators actually take out. His subtraction subtypes are repetitions, specification of reference, conjunctions, transitionals, categories, vocatives and formulae. The list repays reading as a diagnostic: each entry names material that one language requires structurally and another finds redundant, which is why subtraction is so often a question of target-language economy rather than of editorial preference.
Baker supplies the strict condition. Omission is admissible where the meaning of the item is not vital enough to the development of the text to justify distracting the reader with a lengthy explanation. The test is comparative: the cost of losing the item is weighed against the cost of keeping it, not against zero. Delisle frames the unlicensed case in the opposite way, treating unjustified omission as a translation error and not as a procedure at all. Both positions are current, and the difference is not merely terminological. It decides whether a reviser records a loss or raises a defect.
When it applies
- The source repeats material that the target language conventionally states once: near-synonymous doublets, restated subjects, resumptive pronouns.
- A discourse signal has no function in the target text type, as with the connectives that French and Turkish expository prose marks and English prose leaves to sequence.
- The source names a category, classifier or vocative that the target expresses by other means or does not express at all.
- Retaining the item would require an explanation out of proportion to its weight, which is Baker's condition stated positively.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: zarar ve ziyan
- Target: damages
- Comment: A fixed near-synonymous pair of the kind Nida files under repetitions. English legal usage covers both members with a single term, and rendering them separately would imply that the source distinguished two heads of claim. Note the constraint: where the instrument itself treats the two words as distinct, the reduction is no longer available.
FR>EN
- Source: En effet, le délai court à compter de la notification.
- Target: The period runs from the date of notification.
- Comment: A transitional in Nida's sense. French marks that the sentence substantiates what precedes it; English drafting lets position do that work. Nothing propositional is lost, which is why this case sits on the border with implicitation: the relation is still recoverable from the argument.
NL>EN
- Source: Wij verzoeken u vriendelijk het formulier ingevuld te retourneren.
- Target: Please return the completed form.
- Comment: Nida's formulae subtype. The Dutch politeness frame is a fixed opening rather than a statement about the writer's request; English realizes the same courtesy in one word. Reproducing the frame produces a target that is more elaborately deferential than the source.
Watch out for
Reduction is the technique most often applied without being noticed, and the one a reviser checks first, because its evidence is an absence. Two questions discipline it: what exactly has gone, and could the reader have reconstructed it.
- Separate reduction from compression. If the information is still present in fewer words, the technique is linguistic compression. Reduction means the information is gone.
- Declare the omission where the text is binding. In certified, statutory and contractual work an item may not be dropped for economy, and any partial rendering has to be identified as partial.
- Watch the accumulation. Individually harmless subtractions of hedges, modality and specification produce a target text that is more categorical than the source, and no single instance in the file will show it.
References
- Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: E. J. Brill, Ch. 9, "Techniques of Adjustment".
- Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall.
- Baker, M. (1992). In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge, Ch. 2.
- 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.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.