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Explicitation of clausal relations
Acorpus-basedanalysisofclauseconnectives
in translated and non-translated Finnish
children’s literature
Tiina Puurtinen
University of Joensuu
The paper reports on a corpus-based study of clause connectives in translated
and non-translated Finnish children’s literature. The frequent use of clause
connectives as explicit signals of clausal relations in translations might be one
manifestation of the hypothesised translation universal referred to as
explicitation. A one-million-word corpus of children’s books both originally
written in Finnish and translated from English into Finnish was used as
research material to compare the relative frequencies of a number of
connectives (conjunctions, specific adverbs, relative pronouns) signalling e.g.
causal, temporal and postmodifying relations. The results reveal no clear
overall tendency of either translated or originally Finnish literature using
connectives more frequently, and thus fail to fully support the explicitation
hypothesis. Nevertheless, in addition to some frequency differences,
interesting differences were found between translations and originals in the
functions and contexts of a few connectives.
1. Introduction
One of the hypothesised universals of translation is explicitation, which can
refer either to making implicit source text (ST) information explicit in a translation,
or to a higher degree of explicitness in translated texts than in nontranslated
texts in the same target language (TL). The studies by Vanderauwera
(1985) and Blum-Kulka (1986), which address the first type of explicitation,
show that target texts (TTs) tend to explicitate ST material e.g. by using repetitions
and cohesion markers. More recently, the relation between translations
and non-translations has started to attract more attention; Laviosa-Braithwaite