Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

144 Vilma Pápai
It is in the last decade that research into the nature of translated text, that is
into its specific linguistic or discourse features, has gained new impetus mostly
as a consequence of corpus methodology.
2. Background
2.1 Explicitation
Explicitation is one of the features regarded as a universal of translated texts.
Several studies have been carried out to test Blum-Kulka’s hypothesis, which
(. . .) postulates an observed cohesive explicitness from SL to TL texts regardless
of the increase traceable to differences between the two linguistic and
textual systems involved. (Blum-Kulka 1986:19)
In translation studies there have been two main approaches to challenge this
hypothesis. Firstly, until recently research has been based on a comparison of
a source text and a target text involved in translation. In consequence, findings
have been articulated on the basis of contrastive analyses of a – what Toury
calls – “series of (ad hoc) coupled pairs” (Toury 1995:77), such as Dutch –
English (Vanderauwera 1985), English – French and French – English (Blum-
Kulka 1986; Séguinot 1988), Hebrew – English (Weissbrod 1992), English,
French, Russian, German – Hungarian and vice versa (Klaudy 1993a, 1993b,
1996), English – Hebrew (Shlesinger 1995), and also Norwegian – English and
English – Norwegian (Øverås 1996).
As a result, a number of textual features have been identified by drawing
on theoretical and/or empirical research. Table 1 summarises the main characteristics
considered to represent the special qualities translated texts display
in comparison with non-translated texts as forms of a higher level of explicitness:
longer texts, higher redundancy, stronger cohesive and logical ties, better
readability, marked punctuation and improved topic and theme relation. In
addition, this table also shows the views formed about the nature of explicitation
as a strategy, the standpoints taken in the “a professional strategy vs. a
by-product of language mediation” dilemma.
With the introduction of monolingual comparable corpora an entirely
new approach to the investigation of translated text has emerged. This second
approach can be called the “monolingual turn”. Baker (1995:234) formulates
the merits of comparable corpora as follows: