«Ereignis» in Sprache, Literatur und Kultur «Event» in Language, Literature and Culture

1. Introduction: Translation act and translation event

Recently three important trends have surfaced in Translation Studies (TS). On the one hand, research on the cognitive processes involved in translating have been gaining momentum (TPR, translation process research). On the other hand, the sociological aspects of translation have also become a centre of attention; some claim that the time has come for a sociological turn in TS. As an editor of the journal Across Languages and Cultures, I experience these changes through the number of papers sent to the journal on these topics: an increasing number of papers report on research on translators’ status, work conditions, happiness and other sociological aspects. A third trend, which has impacted translation and TS in a spectacular way, is related to technological advances in both the practice of translation and research on translation. Radical changes have taken place in translators’ work. Instead of the solitary translator sitting at her desk and creatively solving translation problems we now have agencies, group translation, translation memories, post-editing machine-translated texts etc.¹ If we look at models of translation competence, we see that the PACTE model (2003, 2005)² has strategic competence as the central subcompetence, reflecting a cognitive view of translation, The EMT model (2009)³, on the other hand, regards translation primarily as the provision of a service, with “translation service provision (competence)” as the central component, including various practical competences.

New technologies and the new image of translation as provision of a service have been reflected in TS research. There seems to be a move away from studying translation as a purely cognitive act. It is being realized that the study of translation as a cognitive act may be very interesting, but this act must be placed in its wider, sociological context, the translation event. That is, translation is a situated cognitive act, part of a translation event. The translation event, ←19 | 20→according to Chesterman (2013)⁴, is a sociological event, the “observable sociological framework in which the cognitive translation act takes place”. There is interaction between the mental and the situational:

An act is […] embedded in an event: the event is the sociological or situational context of the act. The translation event starts with the commissioning and ends with the delivery and use of the translated text, while the translation act begins when the translator begins to read the ST and ends when she decides to take no further action in revising.⁵

Interaction between the mental and the situational, as noted above, is considerable. Aspects of the event, such as the details of the translation brief and the definition of the intended addressees, presumably influence the mindset of the translator and hence the cognitive translation act.

Consequently, studies of the cognitive processes involved in the translation act must take into consideration the situational and sociological aspects of the translation event, and studies of the translation event must show concern for the cognitive aspects of translation. Indeed, several researchers have called into question the boundaries between the translation ‘act’ and ‘event’. Multilingual texts are seen as the result of complex distributed cognitive processes that are influenced by the context the text creators are working in.⁶

3. Explicitation

During the history of the explicitation hypothesis the term explicitation came to be interpreted as the addition of words, i.e. increasing linguistic explicitness, and often it was tacitly assumed that the addition of linguistic material will automatically lead to increased communicative explicitness. Explicitation is defined by Becher¹⁷ as an increase in explicitness, i.e., linguistic explicitness.

Klaudy¹⁸ (1998) divides explicitation into four categories: obligatory, optional, pragmatic and translation-inherent explicitation. Obligatory explicitation is a direct result of linguistic (lexicogrammatical) contrasts, and it results in a higher degree of linguistic explicitness, which, however, cannot be directly ←24 | 25→linked to higher communicative explicitness. For this reason it is regarded as less interesting, and is not usually studied in explicitation research.

Englund Dimitrova¹⁹ argues that optional, pragmatic and translation-inherent explicitation can be united in one category, which she calls pragmatic explicitation. I agree with the unification proposal, but I find that it is better to call this category optional explicitation. It includes choosing, for stylistic, language norm or register related reasons, the more explicit lexico-grammatical form from among two or more alternatives, making pragmatic meanings more explicit (disambiguating illocutionary force, signalling attitude by discourse markers, spelling out implicatures, etc.), explicitating background cultural knowledge, and “translation inherent explicitation” (provided that we recognize its existence).

The concept of explicitation has from the start involved some degree of equivocation in that it was basically understood as linguistic explicitness, i.e. a high degree of overt marking of meaning components, but this was often mixed up with communicative explicitness, i.e. easier processing²³ and more secure, more unambiguous interpretation. For instance, Klaudy²⁴ listed concretisation (specification) – which does not involve addition – with explicitating transfer operations based on communicative explicitness.

Heltai²⁵ pointed out that increased linguistic explicitness, i.e. an increase in the morpheme count cannot be directly related to easier processing. In the following paragraphs, three examples of this problematic issue will be discussed.

The first example concerns lexicogrammatical contrasts that may necessitate explicitation in one translation direction and implicitation in the other direction. Hungarian does not use formal marking of the plural of nouns after numerals. However, it would be preposterous to assume that English three apples (three morphemes, with redundant marking of plurality) is easier to process than Hungarian három alma (two morphemes, with plurality marked only once, by the numeral).

The second example is related to language norms. A feature of English grammar is structural compensation.²⁶ This means that simple verbs are often replaced by constructions containing a delexical verb and the substantivized form of the original verb: to bow – to make a bow, to exclaim – to give an exclamation, to shower – to take/have a shower, etc. In scientific and bureaucratic registers there is a marked tendency to use the analytical form: make analyses, ←26 | 27→observations, etc., which is often criticized by language cultivators as more difficult to understand than simple verbs. However, linguistically it is the analytical form that is more explicit. Heltai and Gósy²⁷ compared the processing of simple verbs and analytical constructions in Hungarian, and found that in some cases it was the simple verb, in other cases the longer constructions that were more easily processed. This suggests that the linguistically more explicit form is not necessarily the most unambiguous, most easily understood/processed form. Register differences may also impact processing: analytical forms, being common in the legal register, may be easier to process for lawyers accustomed to the stylistic conventions of that register than simple verbs.

The third example concerns basic level terms. Basic level terms are described in lexical semantics as words at the cognitively and linguistically most salient level of categorization, at which people conceptualize things as perceptual and functional gestalts.²⁸ It is also noted that children acquire basic level terms first. From this it would follow that basic level terms are easier to process than more specific or more generic terms. Put differently, from the processing point of view it is basic level terms that are the most explicit. However, it is not at all certain that this supposition will hold in all contexts. In a given situation we may refer to an animal by different names: animal, dog, sheepdog, Shetland sheepdog, etc. Clearly, it is dog that represents basic level, but can we be sure that in a given situation the sentence That dog looks hungry is easier to process than That animal looks hungry? We may also conjecture that different levels of linguistic explicitness will be the easiest to process for people with different cognitive environments. For a dog breeder dog may prove too general, and s/he may find the names of specific breeds more processable.

Furthermore, since different languages segment reality in different ways, there may be differences in basic level terms and in usage preferences for more generic or more specific terms. In Hungarian, nyúl is a basic level term, corresponding to two English terms, rabbit and hare. Clearly, the latter two terms are more specific than the former, and in translating from Hungarian into English specification will be required. Will it count as explicitation, if concretisation is considered to be an explicitating translation operation?²⁹

The problem is that a higher degree of specificity may not prove more explicit from the communicative point of view. Translating Nyúlra vadásztak into ←27 | 28→English as either They were shooting rabbits or They were shooting hares involves obligatory concretisation, which looks as if it was explicitation, were it not for the fact that the basic level in Hungarian is nyúl, while in English it is rabbit and hare. Therefore, if both the SL and the TL text contains basic level terms, they will probably require the same amount of processing effort.