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Introduction 7
of several frequent SL patterns give rise to these frequency differences between
translated and non-translated Swedish.
One of the assumed universals of translation is explicitation. The hypothesis
is used to refer either to the process or strategies of making translations
more explicit than their source texts, or to the tendency of translated texts to
exhibit a higher degree of explicitness than original, non-translated texts of the
same TL. To cater methodologically for both assumptions, Vilma Pápai analyses
in her paper a combination of parallel and comparable corpora of Hungarian
and English literary and non-literary texts (the ARRABONA corpus).
First, the analysis of translators’ shifts in the parallel corpus reveals a series
of frequent explicitation strategies on different linguistic levels. At the second
stage, these strategies are taken up for closer analysis in a comparable corpus
of Hungarian. The results provide evidence in support of the above hypotheses
on explicitation as a characteristic feature of the translation process and
on the explicitness of translated texts as compared to non-translated ones. In
contrast to Pápai’s further hypothesis, however, the quantitative data does not
point to any significant differences between the analysed genres, i.e. between
literary and non-literary texts. Finally, Pápai investigates the lexical complexity
of translations and non-translated texts (type/token ratio) and suggests a
connection between various explicitation strategies (e.g. lexical repetition, addition
of conjunctions, filling in ellipsis) and simplification – another alleged
universal of translation.
The second paper dealing with explicitation is written by Tiina Puurtinen.
In contrast to Pápai, Puurtinen concentrates only on explicitation as “a potentially
distinctive quality of translations in comparison with non-translated
TL texts of the same type”, in this case contemporary children’s literature.
Potential manifestations of this quality are the explicit signals of clausal relations,
which offer themselves for use in translated texts as alternatives to
other rather implicit and complex realisations such as non-finite constructions
(NCs). Puurtinen’s earlier research on translated children’s literature showed
that even though NCs are likely to decrease the readability of a text as well as
the facility with which it can be read aloud, and also to make the text more
difficult for children to understand, they nevertheless are very common and
significantly more frequently used in translated than in non-translated children’s
fiction. Puurtinen interprets this as evidence contrary to the hypothesis
of explicitation being a universal tendency. Her basic research question is,
then, whether this feature correlates with infrequent use of explicit connectives
in translated children’s literature. Her findings remain inconclusive, since no
clear correlation was found between low connector use and high NC use. She