Title: Reconceptualizing Explicitation as Informativity Control
Abstract: Explicitation is an indispensable part of the translator’s arsenal and an essential topic in translation studies. The past few decades have seen a dramatic proliferation of studies on the subject, but the concept is still curiously unsettled and there are ambiguities that have yet to be dispelled. This paper aims to provide some clarity by reconceptualizing explicitation in terms of informativity, one of the textual standards studied in text linguistics. After reviewing the relevant literature, including works by Blum-Kulka, Klaudy, Pym, Saldanha, and Beaugrande and Dressler, we will redefine explicitation as a means of controlling informativity. Informativity can change during translation and shift to a higher or lower level in the target text. Explicitation can be viewed as a means of controlling the relationship between a text and its translation with respect to informativity. Once we make this functional connection, we can further identify explicitation with downgrading and implicitation with upgrading informativity, and distinguish the way both processes either maintain or change the informativity level of the source text by labelling them type-m and type-c processes. This finer distinction should allow us to furnish more detailed predictions and to better explain the phenomenon of explicitation.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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