ARE TRANSLATIONS

LONGER THAN SOURCE

TEXTS?
A corpus-based study of explicitation

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
 Contents
What is explicitation?
Evidence of explicitation
Claims about explicitation
Explicitation and text length
COMPARA 5.2
Text length across languages
Results
Conclusion
 What is explicitation?

SOURCE TEXT TARGET TEXT

(ST) (TT)
IMPLICIT EXPLICIT

Vinay & Darbelnet 1958

 explicitation

Obligatory
SOURCE TARGET
TEXT TEXT
(ST) Voluntary (TT)
 explicitation

SOURCE TARGET
TEXT Obligatory TEXT
(ST) (TT)

when the grammar of the target language forces the

translator to add information which is not present in the
source text
Examples of

Obligatory
explicitation
Example (1) illustrates the obligatory explicitation of gender in the translation of
English into Portuguese.
Example (2) illustrates two different aspects of obligatory explicitation in the
translation of Portuguese into English.
 explicitation

SOURCE TARGET
TEXT Voluntary TEXT
(ST) (TT)

when, for no grammatically compelling reason, the translator

distances themselves from the source text making the target
text easier to understand
Examples of

Voluntary
explicitation
In example (3), the translator introduced the adverb so at the beginning of the English
sentence
As shown in example (4), exactly the same can occur in the translation of English into
Portuguese.
As seen in the examples, in contrast to obligatory explicitation, voluntary explicitation
is not dictated by the grammar of the target language.

It can be a result of:

a conscious decision to a subconscious operation

make the target text easier in herent to the process of
to understand translation
 Qualitative evidence of explicitation

There is plenty of evidence in the literature on translation studies showing voluntary

explicitation.

 Vanderauwera (1985), for instance, described numerous examples in the English

translation of Dutch novels.

 Blum-Kulka (1986) found cohesive devices in Hebrew translations that were not
present in English source texts.

 Séguinot (1988) found non-obligatory connectives in translations from English into

French and from French into English.
 Claims about explicitation

 It is one of the universal characteristics of translation (Vanderauwera 1985)

 It is inherent to the nature of the translation process (Séguinot 1988)

 The Explicitation Hypothesis: translations tend to be more explicit than source

texts, regardless of the increase in explicitness dictated by language specific
differences (Blum-Kulka 1986)
 QuaNTITATIVE evidence of
explicitation

 Øverås (1998)
more explicitating shifts than implicitating ones
English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus

 Olohan and Baker (2000)

optional that following the reporting verbs say and tell
Translational English Corpus (TEC) and the British National Corpus (BNC)
 Explicitation and text length
Since the explicitation often takes the form of additions…

…are translations longer than the source texts?

 With a parallel corpus

SOURCE TEXT TARGET TEXT

It's very simple to check whether or not a TT has

more words than a ST
 COMPARA 5.2
 free, online parallel, bi-directional and extensible
 37 source texts (25 in Portuguese and 12 in English) and 40 translations
 text extracts varied from just under 2000 to over 42000 words
 27 different authors and 31 different translators
SOURCE 11% more
TARGET
TEXT words TEXT
(PT) (EN)

SOURCE TARGET
1% fewer
TEXT words
TEXT
(EN) (PT)
 Pt-En translators better off if they base their fees on TT words

En-Pt translators better off if they base their fees on ST words

However, it is not possible to tell the extent to which differences

observed are due to differences between: Portuguese & English
or source texts & translations.
 Word counts as such shed little light on the
relationship between translation and explicitation.
Claims about text length across languages are difficult to
put to test

BECAUSE
● Different measures will affect different languages differently.

● If text length is measured in terms of number of words, for example, it is not

hard to see that whatever the criteria for counting words are, they might
make some languages seem lengthier than others.
Counting words
Table 2 illustrates this by means of a few examples of how word processors count equivalent
meanings in Portuguese and English.
 When comparing the text length across language

more words ≠
SOURCE TEXT greater TARGET TEXT
explicitation

The examples given, however, show that word counts per se are not enough to
compare text length across languages, let alone analyse the relationship between
translation and explicitation.
 Explicitation using fewer words

In fact, as example (7) indicates, a translation can be more explicit than a

source text even when it has fewer words.
 More words but no explicitation
Conversely, example (8) illustrates how there can be an increase
in words in translation without any explicitation whatsoever:
Additionally, some postings on the Corpora List argue that character counts
constitute a better measure for comparing text length across languages

Counting characters
Another method for comparing text length across languages suggested in the
discussion list is morpheme counts, which can be seen in Table 4.

Counting morphemes
 As morpheme counts do not discriminate between the
addition of morphemes dictated by language specific
differences and the extra morphemes that are a product of
voluntary explicitation, they too are not appropriate for
analysing explicitation independently of the differences
between languages.
Words counts affect different languages
differently

To make any claims about text length across languages based

on word counts, the language-dependent bias of word counts
has to be controlled.
 A bi-directional analysis

? Translation
Source Texts Texts

Ly > Lx

Lx Ly

<
But a balanced corpus is essential !
 COMPARA 5.2
Although COMPARA 5.2 contains a similar amount of
Portuguese and English words, it is not a balanced corpus.
 A BALANCED SUB-CORPUS
To ensure a balanced corpus, the starting point for the analysis was the
selection of a sub-corpus.

Assigning equal weight to both languages

16 source texts: 8 PT + 8 EN
Same lenght: 1500 words
It was also important to ensure that no particular author or
translator is over-represented.

16 ST 16 TT
= =
16 authors 16
8 Pt + 8 En translators
8 Pt + 8 En
● To provide this balance, all source texts were reduced to around
1500 words each.

● This was achieved simply by cutting down on the number of

concordances retrieved for each source text until what was left added
up to or near 1500 words.

● The next step was to count how many words there were on the
translation side of the parallel concordances.
 results
The number of words in the 16 English and
Portuguese source texts analysed and the number of
words in their corresponding translations into
Portuguese and English are summarized in Table 6.
It is shown that the increase in the number of words appears to be more
pronounced in the translation of Portuguese into English than in the translation of
English into Portuguese. However, as pointed out earlier, these word counts do not
mean much in themselves because one language could be stretching the word
counts more than the other.

Accordingly, to filter out language-dependent biases, a paired student’s t-test was

therefore applied to the above figures in order to test whether this overall increase
in words from source text to translation was significant.
 Conclusion
It is possible to conclude that the overall increase in
the number of words observed in the translations is
more likely to be due to differences between source
texts and translations.