Textual Explicitation in Two Text-types: Expressive and Informative

Abstract

Explicitation is the process of rendering explicit into a target language what is implicit on the linguistic surface of a source text. Being a general notion, explicitation is of different types, i.e. obligatory, optional, pragmatic, and translation-inherent, and occurs at different linguistic levels, e.g. grammatical, semantic and pragmatic. Taking Blum-Kulka’s (1986) explicitation hypothesis as its starting point, this study focuses on intersentential elliptical structures as a potential source of explicitation. The objective of the study was to see how explicitation is dealt with in expressive and informative text-types. Thus, a corpus was compiled comprising in turn of two sub-corpora. One consisted of 3 English narratives along with their Persian translations, and was named corpus A. The other contained 3 psychological texts as well as their translations in Persian, and was named corpus B. These texts were taken to represent expressive and informative types of texts. The analyses were made on the first 200 translated sentences of each source text. Sentences which had ellipses (nominal, verbal, and clausal) were first located in the original texts. Subsequently, their translations were identified in the target texts. Attention was then paid to see how explicitation behaved in these structures and in the two sub-corpora. Observations indicate that (1) informative texts tend to be explicit by nature, (2) they are far more explicit than expressive texts, and (3) in translation, too, the tendency to be explicitated is much higher in informative than in expressive texts.