Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Explicitation
A universal of translated text?
Vilma Pápai
Széchenyi István University
This article reports on corpus-based investigation of explicitation generally
referred to as one of the universal features of translation. It gives an account
of the findings of a twofold analysis carried out on an English – Hungarian
parallel corpus and a comparative corpus of translated and non-translated
texts in Hungarian. The purpose is to reveal the regularities of both the
translation process in terms of explicitation and the translation product in
terms of text explicitness. The paper will argue that there is a close
connection between explicitation and simplification, another candidate for
translation universals.
1. Introduction
As all texts are shaped by the particular aims for which they were produced,
the particular context in which they were composed, and by the particular
readership to which they are addressed, translated texts must necessarily differ
from non-translated texts. One of the main differences lies in the aim of text
production. The ultimate goal of a writer is to produce a living, new text: “An
author always wants to create sentences which have never existed in the given
language before” (Esterházy 1996:182); a translator, however, renders texts
created by someone else. In other words, the writer of a text seeks to achieve
a formulation, a unique form of words, to fix and convey his matter, be it a
story, relationship or idea. A translator, on the other hand, seeks to achieve a
formulation to fix and convey the matter of another – a matter first conceived
(and formulated!) in an idiom different from his own and that of his readers.
As Baker puts it: “Translated text is normally constrained by a fully developed
and articulated text in another language” (Baker 1996:177).