Year: 1996
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Hungarian, part of the meaning of the English personal pronoun 'she' is lost in Hungarian translation.The concept of explicitation was further developed by Nida, without using the term "explicitation" itself.Nida deals with the techniques of adjustment used in the process of translating.The main techniques of adjustment in his work are: additions, subtractions and alterations.Nida gives the following types of additions: a) filling out elliptical expressions; b) obligatory specification; c) additions required because of the grammatical restructuring; d) amplification from implicit to explicit status; e) answers to rhetorical questions; f) classifiers; g) connectives; h) categories of the receptor language which do not exist in the source language; i) doublets.(1964: 227) "Amplification from implicit to explicit status" in Nida's work is one of the various kinds of additions required in translation.It takes place, when 'important semantic elements carried implicitly in the source language may require explicit identification in the receptor language ' (1964: 228).He lists several examples from Bible-translations to illustrate the range and variety of this type of additions.For example " ... queen of the South" (Luke 11: 31) can be very misleading when neither 'queen' nor 'South' is familiar in the receptor language... Accordingly in Tarascan one must say "women who was ruling in the south country " (1964: 229).Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s most works published on the subject of "partial translation theories", especially in the field of "language-restricted, area-restricted and culturerestricted theories" (terms introduced by Holmes 1972) when discussing additions and omissions in translation refer only accidentally to explicitation or more broadly, to the transformation of implicit information into explicit information and vice versa, as one of the many reasons for additions and omissions.Barkhudarov differentiates four types of transformations in translation: "perestanovka" ('transposition)', "zamena" ('substitution'), "dobavleniye" ('addition)', "opushcheniye" ('omission').According to him, the most important reason for additions in translation from English into Russian are the elliptic nominal structures in English, that is the omission of certain semantic components in English surface structure which were present in the deep structure.As ellipsis is not characteristic of Russian, the omitted semantic components are reconstructed in the Russian surface structure: pay claim -trebovaniye povisit zarplatu (demand to raise the pay)'; gun license -udostovereniye na pravo nosheniya oruzhiya, ('license for right to carry weapon') (1975:223).A very detailed typology of lexical and grammatical transformations, including grammatical additions in Bulgarian-Russian and Russian-Bulgarian translation can be found in the work of the Bulgarian scholar Vaseva (1980).According to her additions are generated by the "linguistic asymmetry", that is by the necessity to express explicitly meanings in the target language that are contained implicitly in the source language.Cases of grammatical additions in Vaseva's work are explained by the so called "missing categories" and categories with different functions: Bulgarian has articles, while Russian has none; the possessive pronoun can be omitted in Russian, unlike in Bulgarian; the copula can be omitted in Russian but not in Bulgarian; the direct object can be -rarely -omitted in Russian, but never in Bulgarian etc.Besides the grammatical additions Vaseva shortly refers to the so called pragmatic additions as well, when concepts generally known for the source language audience may be unfamiliar for the target language audience and therefore they call for explanations in the translation.Analyzing the basic problems of explicitation neither Barkhudarov nor Vaseva use the term explicitation itself, however the Russian term "eksplitsirovaniye" ('explicitation') was introduced by Komissarov in 1969.The terms "eksplitsirovaniye" ('explicitation') and
Author: Klaudy, Kinga
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6980147378