The Explicitation Hypothesis

The assumption that translations are inherently more explicit than their corresponding STs and comparable, non-translated texts written in the TL has become one of the more recurrent tenets of TS. This is largely due to the great influence that Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis has exerted on the development of this discipline, postulating that “explicitation is a universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation” (1986: 21).

The Explicitation Hypothesis was first formulated by Blum-Kulka in 1986 in what is considered by many to be the first systematic study of explicitation. Drawing on concepts and descriptive terms developed within discourse analysis, Blum-Kulka (1986) explores discourse-level explicitation, that is, explicitation connected with shifts of cohesion and coherence (overt and covert textual markers) in translation. Shifts of cohesive markers can be attributed partly to the different grammatical systems of languages (see Section 3.4.1). Other shifts in the use of cohesive markers are attributable to different stylistic preferences for certain types of cohesive markers in different languages (see Section 3.4.2). For example, in English-Hebrew translation

preference for lexical repetition rather than pronominalization may make the Hebrew text more explicit (1986: 19). However, according to the so-called Explicitation Hypothesis, it is the translation process itself, rather than any specific differences between particular languages, which bears the major part of the responsibility for explicitation:

The process of interpretation performed by the translator on the source text might lead to a TL text, which is more redundant than SL text. This redundancy can be expressed by a rise in the level of cohesive explicitness in the TL text. This argument may be stated as ‘the Explicitation 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. It follows that explicitation is viewed here as inherent in the process of translation. (ibid.: 19)

This postulated increase in cohesive explicitness is supposed to occur

“regardless of the increase traceable to differences between the two linguistic and textual systems involved” (ibid.: 19).

This additional stipulation makes clear that Blum-Kulka does acknowledge the existence of obligatory explicitations (which are due to differences between textual systems); nevertheless, the Explicitation Hypothesis postulates an additional, translation-inherent type of explicitation, which is supposed to be caused by the “process of interpretation performed by the translator on the source text” (ibid.: 19).

According to S´eguinot (1988: 108), however, this definition is too narrow:

“explicitness does not necessarily mean redundancy”. S´eguinot also points out that “the greater number of words in a French translation, for example, can be explained by well-documented differences in the stylistics of English and French” (ibid.). In her view, the term ‘explicitation’ should be reserved for additions which cannot be explained by structural, stylistic or rhetorical differences between the two languages, and addition is not the only device of explicitation. Explicitation takes place not only when “something is expressed in the translation, which was not in the original” (ibid.), but also in cases where ‘something which was implied or understood through presupposition in the ST is overtly expressed in the translation, or an element in the ST is given a greater importance in the translation through focus, emphasis, or lexical choice’ (ibid.).

S´eguinot (ibid.) examines translations from English into French and from French into English, and in both cases she finds greater explicitness in translation, resulting from improved topic-comment links, the addition

of linking words and the raising of subordinate information into coordinate or principal structures (ibid.: 109). Her study suggests that the increase in explicitness in both cases can be explained not by structural or stylistic differences between the two languages but by the editing strategies of the revisers.

Support for the Explicitation Hypothesis may also be found in Vehmas-Lehto’s study (1989), which compares the frequency of connective elements in Finnish journalistic texts translated from Russian with their frequency in texts of the same genre, originally written in Finnish. She finds that the Finnish translations are more explicit than the texts originally written in Finnish.

Many other studies (Øver˚as 1998, Olohan and Baker 2000 or P´apai 2004, just to name a few) claim to find evidence in favour of the Explicitation Hypothesis even when they don’t work only with the notion of “cohesive explicitness”, but with other linguistic features unrelated to cohesion, thus considerably widening the actual scope of the Explicitation Hypothesis.

3.6.1 Discussion

The argumentative frame used in this section will closely follow the three main issues already pointed out by Becher (2010a) in regard to the scientific status of the Explicitation Hypothesis. Blum-Kulka (1986) states that the process of interpretation that invariably happens in translation “might” lead to a TT which is more redundant, or explicit, than the corresponding ST, but we do not learn how the interpretation process is supposed to produce this effect.

It is sometimes claimed that the Explicitation Hypothesis may be mo-tivated as follows: When translators interpret the ST, they enrich their interpretation with inferential meaning (e.g. by interpreting temporal se-quence as causal sese-quence), as is normal in text comprehension processes (Graesser et al. 1994). This pragmatically enriched interpretation is of course more explicit than the ST itself and it may thus lead to a more explicit TT. This conclusion, however, may not always be the case since it depends on the assumption that translators directly verbalize their (more explicit) mental representation on the ST, without applying operations that might render it in not such an explicit way, such as politeness strategies, omission of contextually inferable material, etc. There is no reason why translators in contrast to authors of non-translated texts should skip the application of such operations.

As pointed by Becher (2010a: 6), it can be argued that Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis does not fully qualify as a scientific hypothesis. It is

crucially important for a hypothesis to be motivated because non-motivated hypotheses entail the danger of pseudo-significant findings, i.e. statistically significant but otherwise meaningless results. An example of an alternative cause for explicitation in translations would be a (hypothesized) universal tendency of translators to simplify (Baker 1993: 244, 1996: 181ff), which potentially “raises the level of explicitness by resolving ambiguity” (1996:

182) and thus may also result in TTs that are more explicit. It is often the case in corpus-based translation studies that “the same surface expression may point to different features or tendencies” (1996: 180). If we want to fully accept Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis as a scientific one, then we need to demonstrate that it is better motivated than the “explicitation through simplification hypothesis” sketched by Becher (2010a).

The second criticizing that the Explicitation Hypothesis must face is that it does not conform to the principle of Occam’s Razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’). This principle, which has become one of the cornerstones of scientific research, calls for hypotheses that are parsimonious in their assumptions and thus not only more easy to handle, but also more likely to be true. Blum-Kulka assumes a new entity, namely a new type of explicitation that is translation-inherent also acknowledge by Klaudy’s classification (2008).

This means that any other hypothesis which might explain an observed tendency of explicitation in translation without assuming a new type of explicitation is better compatible with Occam’s Razor and thus to be preferred over the Explicitation Hypothesis.

Following the example provided by Becher (2010a) about a hypothetic

“explicitation through simplification hypothesis” already sketched above, we could explain a universal tendency of explicitation without postulating a new type of explicitation. It would simply be assumed that the (hypothesized) urge of translators to simplify makes them resort to optional and pragmatic explicitations more often than appropriate and/or necessary. Under this assumption it would be possible to explain the data without postulating an additional translation-inherent kind of explicitation. So this hypothesis is more compatible with Occam’s Razor and should thus be preferred over Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis.

Finally, in a later passage of her paper, Blum-Kulka (1986) paraphrases the Explicitation Hypothesis postulating that “explicitation is a universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation” (1986: 21), where the term strategy particularly calls our attention. It is not clear whether Blum-Kulka means a conscious or a subconscious strategy. Olohan and Baker (2000) seem to interpret her as meaning the latter while Øver˚as (1998) seems to interpret her as meaning the former. In other words, although both Olohan and Baker

as well as Øver˚as invoke Blum-Kulka’s considerations as the basis of their studies, it is unclear how they motivate the supposedly same phenomenon.

The three criticisms pointed out by Becher (2010a) are not minor short-comings, but fundamental issues that seriously question the way in which the Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis should be approached in TS. In this respect, the Explicitation Hypothesis has been extremely useful in TS but after an initial phase of pioneering explicitation research, the time has come to work with a better motivated hypothesis to explain explicitation phenomena in translation.

An alternative hypothesis that may be motivated on independent grounds and that is compatible with Occam’s Razor is Klaudy and K´aroly’s 2005 Asymmetry Hypothesis. The Asymmetry Hypothesis can serve as a more useful and plausible guide for further research on explicitation. Another promising approach to the study of explicitation in translation is not to depart from a hypothesis-generating perspective. Such a data-driven approach has been pursued by Hansen-Schirra, Kunz, Neumann and Steiner at the Unviersity of Saarbr¨ucken in recent years. One of their aims is a more fine-grained operationalization of the concept of explicitness/explicitation, which they try to achieve “by defining explicitness and explicitation, by stratifying it in term of different linguistic levels, by tightening its boundaries and by modularizing it in a multifunctional perspective.” (Steiner 2005: 19). The results of this new approach are presented in Hansen-Schirra et al. (2007), Steiner (2008) and Kunz (2009).