Abandoning the notion of “translation-inherent” explicitation: Against a dogma of translation studies

Abstract

One of the best-known hypotheses of translation studies, the Explicitation Hypothesis, postulates that explicitation is "inherent" in the process of translation and may therefore be regarded as a "universal of translation". In recent years, a number of corpusbased studies on explicitation have been produced, most of which purport to offer evidence in favor of this hypothesis. As a consequence, the alleged universality of explicitation has achieved the status of dogma in translation studies. The aim of the present article is to show that the dogma of translation-inherent explicitation rests on fallacious theoretical considerations and premature interpretations of empirical data. In the first place, it will be argued that the Explicitation Hypothesis strictly speaking does not even qualify as a scientific hypothesis, since it is unmotivated, unparsimonious and vaguely formulated. In the second place, it will be shown that previous studies on explicitation fail to provide conclusive evidence for the translation-inherent nature of explicitation due to a number of methodological shortcomings.

8 Typological differences shining through. The case of phrasal verbs in translated English

“…Becher 2010, Lind 2007 or Kruger and Van Rooy 2012). Their very existence is controversial and many suggested universals have been severely criticized these last ten years (e.g.…”

Translating Le Monde and El País English Business Loan Terms into Arabic: A Corpus-based Analysis

“…In fact several translation aspects have been investigated using corpus-based translation approaches. For example, the translation universals hypothesis, which argues that there are invariant features that characterize all translated texts irrespective of source language and translation direction, has been tested using corpora approaches (e.g., Becher, 2010;Jantunen, 2002). Corpus-based studies have also examined translators' styles and words choice motivations (Saldanha, 2011).…”

Following the Trail of Source Languages in Literary Translations

“…However, the concept of translation universals remains a controversial issue, partly connected to the difficulty of proving it and thus is constantly challenged by emerging research, as recently by Becher (2010) and by Volansky et al (2013).…”

“…For instance, a study into bidirectional transfer has shown that one is influenced by a language's conceptual properties regardless of whether it was learned as a first or second language (Degani et al, 2011). 2 Another issue is related to register interference for pairs of languages that have a similar syntactic realisation of certain items, but which do not share the same register or code relation, where two items in L2 of different register point to one lexical and register representation in L1. For example, in German "Ich bin" can translate to both "I am" and "I'm" in English.…”