When and why do translators add connectivesA corpus-based study

Viktor BecherUniversitaumlt Hamburg

Additions and omissions of connectives (eg conjunctions connective adverbs etc) are a frequent phenomenon in translation The present article reports on a study whose aim was to elucidate translatorsrsquo motivations for performing such shifts focusing on the addition of connectives The study was carried out on a bidirectional parallel corpus containing translations of business texts between English and German Connective additions and omissions were identified counted and analyzed taking into account the surrounding linguistic context of the shift in question possibly associated shifts performed by the translator al-ternative translation options etc It was found that the vast majority of identified shifts were attributable to previously established English-German contrasts in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms The findings suggest that it is unnecessary to assume that translators follow a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo of explicita-tion as it has often been done in the literature (cf eg Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicita-tion Hypothesis)

Keywords explicitation implicitation connective addition omission shift translation universals

1 Introduction

Explicitation may be defined as the verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (eg from the preceding discourse) if it were not verbal-ized Explicitation may then be defined as an increase in explicitness in translation (Becher 2010a 3) The present article reports on a study that was carried out in order to elucidate when and why translators explicitate Like previous studies the present study makes use of a bidirectional translation corpus in which additions and omissions of connectives were identified and counted But unlike previous

Target 231 (2011) 26ndash47 doi 101075target23102becissn 0924ndash1884 e-issn 1569ndash9986 copy John Benjamins Publishing Company

When and why do translators add connectives 27

studies the present study does not depart from Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hy-pothesis for reasons which will be detailed in the next section Previous studies on explicitation have tended to be quick to ascribe seemingly unexplainable occur-rences of explicitation to an allegedly ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986 21) The present study is very different in that it goes to great lengths to find less esoteric reasons for when and why transla-tors explicitate taking into account general pragmatic considerations as well as cross-linguistic differences in syntax lexis and communicative norms A main aim of the study was to show that we do not need the assumption of a translation-inherent process of explicitation in order to explain the ubiquity of explicitation in translation (The study presented here is part of a much larger study in which I analyzed some two thousand explicitating and implicitating shifts including many other kinds of shifts than connective additions and omissions See Becher (2011a) The results presented in this article may be seen as a representative subset of the findings of the larger project)

The article is structured as follows Section 2 provides a brief and critical over-view of previous research on explicitation In Section 3 details of the aim and methodology of the study reported in this article will be given Sections 4 and 5 feature the quantitative and qualitative results obtained from the study Finally Section 6 and 7 round off the article by drawing some more general conclusions

2 A very brief (and very critical) overview of previous research on explicitation

Most studies on explicitation so far have been carried out under the umbrella of Shoshana Blum-Kulkarsquos famous Explicitation Hypothesis which postulates that ldquoexplicitation is a universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo (1986 21) As Becher (2010a) has pointed out however this hypothesis suffers from three serious problems

First the Explicitation Hypothesis is unmotivated because it does not give a reason why translations should be ldquoinherentlyrdquo more explicit than non-translated texts Why should the cognitive process underlying translation favor explicitation (and not implicitation for example) Or in other words which exact property of the translation process is responsible for the occurrence of translation-inherent explicitation The young field of translation process research (see Goumlpferich and Jaumlaumlskelaumlinen 2009 for a recent overview) might provide an answer to this question one day But as long as the question remains unanswered mdash and it is not clear whether there is an answer in the first place mdash the Explicitation Hypothesis will remain a wild speculation that can hardly be called a scientific hypothesis

28 Viktor Becher

Second the Explicitation Hypothesis is unparsimonious because it postulates the existence of a distinct language pair-independent type of explicitation Every-body will agree that any given translation corpus will almost inevitably contain a number of explicitations necessitated by differences between the source and target language (cf eg the examples of ldquoobligatory explicitationrdquo given by Klaudy 2008) The concept of translation-inherent explicitation on the other hand is far from obvious since it requires the assumption that there is something special about the translation process that causes an additional language pair-independent type of ex-plicitation But Occamrsquos Razor postulates that the number of assumptions in science should be kept to a minimum The Explicitation Hypothesis violates this principle

Third and finally the Explicitation Hypothesis has been vaguely formulated The different formulations that Blum-Kulka provides contain a number of non-trivial terms that are in need of a definition For example Blum-Kulka states that explicitation is due to a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (1986 21) where we have to ask what kind of strategy she has in mind (conscious subconscious) and what ldquouniversalrdquo is supposed to mean (followed by all translators followed by most translators)

Becher (2010a) concludes that these problems are so fundamental that the Ex-plicitation Hypothesis in its present form is unscientific and should not be inves-tigated anymore Despite the three problems (which are generally not addressed in the literature) there have been quite a few studies on Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesis and almost all of them claim to offer evidence in support of it Cf the following quotations for example

ndash Oslashverarings (1998 16) ldquowithin the framework of the present analysis Blum-Kulkarsquos explicitation hypothesis is confirmedrdquo

ndash Paacutepai (2004 157) ldquoexplicitation is likely to be a universal feature of translated texts ie this set of data supports Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesisrdquo

ndash Konšalovaacute (2007 31) ldquoThe results of this study are in line with the findings of other authors whose research offers data in support of the explicitation hypothesis [hellip]rdquo

But this conclusion has been wrong in all cases As Becher (2010a 2010b 2011a) has shown studies of the Explicitation Hypothesis such as the ones quoted above suffer from at least one of the following grave problems

1 They have failed to control for interfering factors eg language pair-specific types of explicitation source language interference effects of other putative translation universals such as simplification etc

2 They have relied on an inadequate definition of explicitation or have provided no definition (If there is a definition at all it is not applied to corpus data in a consistent way)

When and why do translators add connectives 29

The two problems have the same detrimental effect namely that shifts are counted as explicitations that should really be treated as totally different phenomena This counting of pseudo-explictations of course means that studies suffering from the above problems can hardly be taken to support the Explicitation Hypothesis I only know of a single study on the Explicitation Hypothesis to which the above two points of criticism do not apply Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) Out of several phenomena investigated Hansen-Schirra and colleagues have identified a single phenomenon (a rise in lexical density from source to target text) that ldquomight be due to the translation processrdquo (2007 261) It can hardly be a coincidence that the most methodologically stringent study has come to the most careful conclusion

In search of a better alternative to the Explicitation Hypothesis Becher (2010a) has argued that future studies should depart from Kinga Klaudyrsquos (2009) Asym-metry Hypothesis instead In its formulation by Klaudy and Kaacuteroly (2005 14) the hypothesis postulates that

explicitations in the L1 rarr L2 direction are not always counterbalanced by im-plicitations in the L2 rarr L1 direction because translators mdash if they have a choice mdash prefer to use operations involving explicitation and often fail to perform optional implicitation

We see that the Asymmetry Hypothesis does not assume the existence of a dis-tinct translation-inherent type of explicitation Rather it claims that among the language pair-specific types of explicitation (cf Klaudyrsquos 2008 ldquoobligatoryrdquo ldquoop-tionalrdquo and ldquopragmaticrdquo types of explicitation) whose existence is uncontrover-sial explicitations tend to outnumber the corresponding implicitations1 With respect to the present studyrsquos object of investigation this means that connectives should tend to be added more frequently by translators than they are omitted mdash a hypothesis that can easily be tested on any given (bidirectional) translation cor-pus (Note that the Asymmetry Hypothesis is not only more parsimonious than the Explicitation Hypothesis but may also be motivated with recourse to typi-cal properties of the communicative situation underlying translation mdash see Sec-tion 55 below)

3 Study aim data method and object of investigation

The present study has two aims As a primary objective it aims to test Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis as it has been formulated above which in the context of the present study amounts to the claim that the corpus under investigation contains more additions than omissions of connectives As a secondary objec-tive the study aims to show that we do not need the assumption of a mysterious

30 Viktor Becher

translation-inherent type of explicitation in order to explain the addition of con-nectives in translation by pointing out when and why translators add connectives

The study was carried out on a bidirectional English-German translation cor-pus consisting of the following four quantitatively comparable subcorpora

1 English texts (21222 words)2 Their German translations (21808 words)3 German texts (21253 words)4 Their English translations (24474 words)

The texts contained in the corpus are business texts (mostly letters to sharehold-ers sampled from international companiesrsquo annual reports) that were published between 1993 and 2002 The corpus is quite small in terms of word count but since the lexical material is distributed across quite a large number of texts (86 short texts in total) mostly by different authorstranslators reliability should not be a problem

Turning to the studyrsquos object of investigation connectives are a good starting point for the investigation of explicitation in translation since they are regularly added and omitted by translators and their additionomission is generally easy to spot A connective is a conjunction sentence adverbial or particle that assigns semantic roles to clauses sentences or larger stretches of discourse (eg CausendashEffect) (cf Pasch et al 2003 Bluumlhdorn 2008) It is important to see that this is a functional (semantic) definition of the term connective It includes many different kinds of expressions to which we intuitively ascribe a connective function (eg firsthellipsecond however as a result) Nevertheless the definition is precise and easy to operationalize

Finally let us turn to the method that has been pursued in the present study In a close reading of all source texts contained in the corpus connectives were identified manually For each sentence containing a connective the correspond-ing target text sentence was searched carefully for possible translation equivalents taking into account not only obvious lexical equivalents (eg and mdash und lsquoandrsquo) but also syntactic constructions word order patterns etc that might be taken as reproducing the semantic effect of the connective in question In this way im-plicitations (= connective omissions) were identified Next using the same close-reading approach all target texts were manually scanned for connectives that have no equivalent in the corresponding source text segment In this way explicitations (= connective additions) were identified The procedure was applied to both trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 27

studies the present study does not depart from Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hy-pothesis for reasons which will be detailed in the next section Previous studies on explicitation have tended to be quick to ascribe seemingly unexplainable occur-rences of explicitation to an allegedly ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986 21) The present study is very different in that it goes to great lengths to find less esoteric reasons for when and why transla-tors explicitate taking into account general pragmatic considerations as well as cross-linguistic differences in syntax lexis and communicative norms A main aim of the study was to show that we do not need the assumption of a translation-inherent process of explicitation in order to explain the ubiquity of explicitation in translation (The study presented here is part of a much larger study in which I analyzed some two thousand explicitating and implicitating shifts including many other kinds of shifts than connective additions and omissions See Becher (2011a) The results presented in this article may be seen as a representative subset of the findings of the larger project)

The article is structured as follows Section 2 provides a brief and critical over-view of previous research on explicitation In Section 3 details of the aim and methodology of the study reported in this article will be given Sections 4 and 5 feature the quantitative and qualitative results obtained from the study Finally Section 6 and 7 round off the article by drawing some more general conclusions

2 A very brief (and very critical) overview of previous research on explicitation

Most studies on explicitation so far have been carried out under the umbrella of Shoshana Blum-Kulkarsquos famous Explicitation Hypothesis which postulates that ldquoexplicitation is a universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo (1986 21) As Becher (2010a) has pointed out however this hypothesis suffers from three serious problems

First the Explicitation Hypothesis is unmotivated because it does not give a reason why translations should be ldquoinherentlyrdquo more explicit than non-translated texts Why should the cognitive process underlying translation favor explicitation (and not implicitation for example) Or in other words which exact property of the translation process is responsible for the occurrence of translation-inherent explicitation The young field of translation process research (see Goumlpferich and Jaumlaumlskelaumlinen 2009 for a recent overview) might provide an answer to this question one day But as long as the question remains unanswered mdash and it is not clear whether there is an answer in the first place mdash the Explicitation Hypothesis will remain a wild speculation that can hardly be called a scientific hypothesis

28 Viktor Becher

Second the Explicitation Hypothesis is unparsimonious because it postulates the existence of a distinct language pair-independent type of explicitation Every-body will agree that any given translation corpus will almost inevitably contain a number of explicitations necessitated by differences between the source and target language (cf eg the examples of ldquoobligatory explicitationrdquo given by Klaudy 2008) The concept of translation-inherent explicitation on the other hand is far from obvious since it requires the assumption that there is something special about the translation process that causes an additional language pair-independent type of ex-plicitation But Occamrsquos Razor postulates that the number of assumptions in science should be kept to a minimum The Explicitation Hypothesis violates this principle

Third and finally the Explicitation Hypothesis has been vaguely formulated The different formulations that Blum-Kulka provides contain a number of non-trivial terms that are in need of a definition For example Blum-Kulka states that explicitation is due to a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (1986 21) where we have to ask what kind of strategy she has in mind (conscious subconscious) and what ldquouniversalrdquo is supposed to mean (followed by all translators followed by most translators)

Becher (2010a) concludes that these problems are so fundamental that the Ex-plicitation Hypothesis in its present form is unscientific and should not be inves-tigated anymore Despite the three problems (which are generally not addressed in the literature) there have been quite a few studies on Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesis and almost all of them claim to offer evidence in support of it Cf the following quotations for example

ndash Oslashverarings (1998 16) ldquowithin the framework of the present analysis Blum-Kulkarsquos explicitation hypothesis is confirmedrdquo

ndash Paacutepai (2004 157) ldquoexplicitation is likely to be a universal feature of translated texts ie this set of data supports Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesisrdquo

ndash Konšalovaacute (2007 31) ldquoThe results of this study are in line with the findings of other authors whose research offers data in support of the explicitation hypothesis [hellip]rdquo

But this conclusion has been wrong in all cases As Becher (2010a 2010b 2011a) has shown studies of the Explicitation Hypothesis such as the ones quoted above suffer from at least one of the following grave problems

1 They have failed to control for interfering factors eg language pair-specific types of explicitation source language interference effects of other putative translation universals such as simplification etc

2 They have relied on an inadequate definition of explicitation or have provided no definition (If there is a definition at all it is not applied to corpus data in a consistent way)

When and why do translators add connectives 29

The two problems have the same detrimental effect namely that shifts are counted as explicitations that should really be treated as totally different phenomena This counting of pseudo-explictations of course means that studies suffering from the above problems can hardly be taken to support the Explicitation Hypothesis I only know of a single study on the Explicitation Hypothesis to which the above two points of criticism do not apply Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) Out of several phenomena investigated Hansen-Schirra and colleagues have identified a single phenomenon (a rise in lexical density from source to target text) that ldquomight be due to the translation processrdquo (2007 261) It can hardly be a coincidence that the most methodologically stringent study has come to the most careful conclusion

In search of a better alternative to the Explicitation Hypothesis Becher (2010a) has argued that future studies should depart from Kinga Klaudyrsquos (2009) Asym-metry Hypothesis instead In its formulation by Klaudy and Kaacuteroly (2005 14) the hypothesis postulates that

explicitations in the L1 rarr L2 direction are not always counterbalanced by im-plicitations in the L2 rarr L1 direction because translators mdash if they have a choice mdash prefer to use operations involving explicitation and often fail to perform optional implicitation

We see that the Asymmetry Hypothesis does not assume the existence of a dis-tinct translation-inherent type of explicitation Rather it claims that among the language pair-specific types of explicitation (cf Klaudyrsquos 2008 ldquoobligatoryrdquo ldquoop-tionalrdquo and ldquopragmaticrdquo types of explicitation) whose existence is uncontrover-sial explicitations tend to outnumber the corresponding implicitations1 With respect to the present studyrsquos object of investigation this means that connectives should tend to be added more frequently by translators than they are omitted mdash a hypothesis that can easily be tested on any given (bidirectional) translation cor-pus (Note that the Asymmetry Hypothesis is not only more parsimonious than the Explicitation Hypothesis but may also be motivated with recourse to typi-cal properties of the communicative situation underlying translation mdash see Sec-tion 55 below)

3 Study aim data method and object of investigation

The present study has two aims As a primary objective it aims to test Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis as it has been formulated above which in the context of the present study amounts to the claim that the corpus under investigation contains more additions than omissions of connectives As a secondary objec-tive the study aims to show that we do not need the assumption of a mysterious

30 Viktor Becher

translation-inherent type of explicitation in order to explain the addition of con-nectives in translation by pointing out when and why translators add connectives

The study was carried out on a bidirectional English-German translation cor-pus consisting of the following four quantitatively comparable subcorpora

1 English texts (21222 words)2 Their German translations (21808 words)3 German texts (21253 words)4 Their English translations (24474 words)

The texts contained in the corpus are business texts (mostly letters to sharehold-ers sampled from international companiesrsquo annual reports) that were published between 1993 and 2002 The corpus is quite small in terms of word count but since the lexical material is distributed across quite a large number of texts (86 short texts in total) mostly by different authorstranslators reliability should not be a problem

Turning to the studyrsquos object of investigation connectives are a good starting point for the investigation of explicitation in translation since they are regularly added and omitted by translators and their additionomission is generally easy to spot A connective is a conjunction sentence adverbial or particle that assigns semantic roles to clauses sentences or larger stretches of discourse (eg CausendashEffect) (cf Pasch et al 2003 Bluumlhdorn 2008) It is important to see that this is a functional (semantic) definition of the term connective It includes many different kinds of expressions to which we intuitively ascribe a connective function (eg firsthellipsecond however as a result) Nevertheless the definition is precise and easy to operationalize

Finally let us turn to the method that has been pursued in the present study In a close reading of all source texts contained in the corpus connectives were identified manually For each sentence containing a connective the correspond-ing target text sentence was searched carefully for possible translation equivalents taking into account not only obvious lexical equivalents (eg and mdash und lsquoandrsquo) but also syntactic constructions word order patterns etc that might be taken as reproducing the semantic effect of the connective in question In this way im-plicitations (= connective omissions) were identified Next using the same close-reading approach all target texts were manually scanned for connectives that have no equivalent in the corresponding source text segment In this way explicitations (= connective additions) were identified The procedure was applied to both trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

28 Viktor Becher

Second the Explicitation Hypothesis is unparsimonious because it postulates the existence of a distinct language pair-independent type of explicitation Every-body will agree that any given translation corpus will almost inevitably contain a number of explicitations necessitated by differences between the source and target language (cf eg the examples of ldquoobligatory explicitationrdquo given by Klaudy 2008) The concept of translation-inherent explicitation on the other hand is far from obvious since it requires the assumption that there is something special about the translation process that causes an additional language pair-independent type of ex-plicitation But Occamrsquos Razor postulates that the number of assumptions in science should be kept to a minimum The Explicitation Hypothesis violates this principle

Third and finally the Explicitation Hypothesis has been vaguely formulated The different formulations that Blum-Kulka provides contain a number of non-trivial terms that are in need of a definition For example Blum-Kulka states that explicitation is due to a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (1986 21) where we have to ask what kind of strategy she has in mind (conscious subconscious) and what ldquouniversalrdquo is supposed to mean (followed by all translators followed by most translators)

Becher (2010a) concludes that these problems are so fundamental that the Ex-plicitation Hypothesis in its present form is unscientific and should not be inves-tigated anymore Despite the three problems (which are generally not addressed in the literature) there have been quite a few studies on Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesis and almost all of them claim to offer evidence in support of it Cf the following quotations for example

ndash Oslashverarings (1998 16) ldquowithin the framework of the present analysis Blum-Kulkarsquos explicitation hypothesis is confirmedrdquo

ndash Paacutepai (2004 157) ldquoexplicitation is likely to be a universal feature of translated texts ie this set of data supports Blum-Kulkarsquos hypothesisrdquo

ndash Konšalovaacute (2007 31) ldquoThe results of this study are in line with the findings of other authors whose research offers data in support of the explicitation hypothesis [hellip]rdquo

But this conclusion has been wrong in all cases As Becher (2010a 2010b 2011a) has shown studies of the Explicitation Hypothesis such as the ones quoted above suffer from at least one of the following grave problems

1 They have failed to control for interfering factors eg language pair-specific types of explicitation source language interference effects of other putative translation universals such as simplification etc

2 They have relied on an inadequate definition of explicitation or have provided no definition (If there is a definition at all it is not applied to corpus data in a consistent way)

When and why do translators add connectives 29

The two problems have the same detrimental effect namely that shifts are counted as explicitations that should really be treated as totally different phenomena This counting of pseudo-explictations of course means that studies suffering from the above problems can hardly be taken to support the Explicitation Hypothesis I only know of a single study on the Explicitation Hypothesis to which the above two points of criticism do not apply Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) Out of several phenomena investigated Hansen-Schirra and colleagues have identified a single phenomenon (a rise in lexical density from source to target text) that ldquomight be due to the translation processrdquo (2007 261) It can hardly be a coincidence that the most methodologically stringent study has come to the most careful conclusion

In search of a better alternative to the Explicitation Hypothesis Becher (2010a) has argued that future studies should depart from Kinga Klaudyrsquos (2009) Asym-metry Hypothesis instead In its formulation by Klaudy and Kaacuteroly (2005 14) the hypothesis postulates that

explicitations in the L1 rarr L2 direction are not always counterbalanced by im-plicitations in the L2 rarr L1 direction because translators mdash if they have a choice mdash prefer to use operations involving explicitation and often fail to perform optional implicitation

We see that the Asymmetry Hypothesis does not assume the existence of a dis-tinct translation-inherent type of explicitation Rather it claims that among the language pair-specific types of explicitation (cf Klaudyrsquos 2008 ldquoobligatoryrdquo ldquoop-tionalrdquo and ldquopragmaticrdquo types of explicitation) whose existence is uncontrover-sial explicitations tend to outnumber the corresponding implicitations1 With respect to the present studyrsquos object of investigation this means that connectives should tend to be added more frequently by translators than they are omitted mdash a hypothesis that can easily be tested on any given (bidirectional) translation cor-pus (Note that the Asymmetry Hypothesis is not only more parsimonious than the Explicitation Hypothesis but may also be motivated with recourse to typi-cal properties of the communicative situation underlying translation mdash see Sec-tion 55 below)

3 Study aim data method and object of investigation

The present study has two aims As a primary objective it aims to test Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis as it has been formulated above which in the context of the present study amounts to the claim that the corpus under investigation contains more additions than omissions of connectives As a secondary objec-tive the study aims to show that we do not need the assumption of a mysterious

30 Viktor Becher

translation-inherent type of explicitation in order to explain the addition of con-nectives in translation by pointing out when and why translators add connectives

The study was carried out on a bidirectional English-German translation cor-pus consisting of the following four quantitatively comparable subcorpora

1 English texts (21222 words)2 Their German translations (21808 words)3 German texts (21253 words)4 Their English translations (24474 words)

The texts contained in the corpus are business texts (mostly letters to sharehold-ers sampled from international companiesrsquo annual reports) that were published between 1993 and 2002 The corpus is quite small in terms of word count but since the lexical material is distributed across quite a large number of texts (86 short texts in total) mostly by different authorstranslators reliability should not be a problem

Turning to the studyrsquos object of investigation connectives are a good starting point for the investigation of explicitation in translation since they are regularly added and omitted by translators and their additionomission is generally easy to spot A connective is a conjunction sentence adverbial or particle that assigns semantic roles to clauses sentences or larger stretches of discourse (eg CausendashEffect) (cf Pasch et al 2003 Bluumlhdorn 2008) It is important to see that this is a functional (semantic) definition of the term connective It includes many different kinds of expressions to which we intuitively ascribe a connective function (eg firsthellipsecond however as a result) Nevertheless the definition is precise and easy to operationalize

Finally let us turn to the method that has been pursued in the present study In a close reading of all source texts contained in the corpus connectives were identified manually For each sentence containing a connective the correspond-ing target text sentence was searched carefully for possible translation equivalents taking into account not only obvious lexical equivalents (eg and mdash und lsquoandrsquo) but also syntactic constructions word order patterns etc that might be taken as reproducing the semantic effect of the connective in question In this way im-plicitations (= connective omissions) were identified Next using the same close-reading approach all target texts were manually scanned for connectives that have no equivalent in the corresponding source text segment In this way explicitations (= connective additions) were identified The procedure was applied to both trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 29

The two problems have the same detrimental effect namely that shifts are counted as explicitations that should really be treated as totally different phenomena This counting of pseudo-explictations of course means that studies suffering from the above problems can hardly be taken to support the Explicitation Hypothesis I only know of a single study on the Explicitation Hypothesis to which the above two points of criticism do not apply Hansen-Schirra et al (2007) Out of several phenomena investigated Hansen-Schirra and colleagues have identified a single phenomenon (a rise in lexical density from source to target text) that ldquomight be due to the translation processrdquo (2007 261) It can hardly be a coincidence that the most methodologically stringent study has come to the most careful conclusion

In search of a better alternative to the Explicitation Hypothesis Becher (2010a) has argued that future studies should depart from Kinga Klaudyrsquos (2009) Asym-metry Hypothesis instead In its formulation by Klaudy and Kaacuteroly (2005 14) the hypothesis postulates that

explicitations in the L1 rarr L2 direction are not always counterbalanced by im-plicitations in the L2 rarr L1 direction because translators mdash if they have a choice mdash prefer to use operations involving explicitation and often fail to perform optional implicitation

We see that the Asymmetry Hypothesis does not assume the existence of a dis-tinct translation-inherent type of explicitation Rather it claims that among the language pair-specific types of explicitation (cf Klaudyrsquos 2008 ldquoobligatoryrdquo ldquoop-tionalrdquo and ldquopragmaticrdquo types of explicitation) whose existence is uncontrover-sial explicitations tend to outnumber the corresponding implicitations1 With respect to the present studyrsquos object of investigation this means that connectives should tend to be added more frequently by translators than they are omitted mdash a hypothesis that can easily be tested on any given (bidirectional) translation cor-pus (Note that the Asymmetry Hypothesis is not only more parsimonious than the Explicitation Hypothesis but may also be motivated with recourse to typi-cal properties of the communicative situation underlying translation mdash see Sec-tion 55 below)

3 Study aim data method and object of investigation

The present study has two aims As a primary objective it aims to test Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis as it has been formulated above which in the context of the present study amounts to the claim that the corpus under investigation contains more additions than omissions of connectives As a secondary objec-tive the study aims to show that we do not need the assumption of a mysterious

30 Viktor Becher

translation-inherent type of explicitation in order to explain the addition of con-nectives in translation by pointing out when and why translators add connectives

The study was carried out on a bidirectional English-German translation cor-pus consisting of the following four quantitatively comparable subcorpora

1 English texts (21222 words)2 Their German translations (21808 words)3 German texts (21253 words)4 Their English translations (24474 words)

The texts contained in the corpus are business texts (mostly letters to sharehold-ers sampled from international companiesrsquo annual reports) that were published between 1993 and 2002 The corpus is quite small in terms of word count but since the lexical material is distributed across quite a large number of texts (86 short texts in total) mostly by different authorstranslators reliability should not be a problem

Turning to the studyrsquos object of investigation connectives are a good starting point for the investigation of explicitation in translation since they are regularly added and omitted by translators and their additionomission is generally easy to spot A connective is a conjunction sentence adverbial or particle that assigns semantic roles to clauses sentences or larger stretches of discourse (eg CausendashEffect) (cf Pasch et al 2003 Bluumlhdorn 2008) It is important to see that this is a functional (semantic) definition of the term connective It includes many different kinds of expressions to which we intuitively ascribe a connective function (eg firsthellipsecond however as a result) Nevertheless the definition is precise and easy to operationalize

Finally let us turn to the method that has been pursued in the present study In a close reading of all source texts contained in the corpus connectives were identified manually For each sentence containing a connective the correspond-ing target text sentence was searched carefully for possible translation equivalents taking into account not only obvious lexical equivalents (eg and mdash und lsquoandrsquo) but also syntactic constructions word order patterns etc that might be taken as reproducing the semantic effect of the connective in question In this way im-plicitations (= connective omissions) were identified Next using the same close-reading approach all target texts were manually scanned for connectives that have no equivalent in the corresponding source text segment In this way explicitations (= connective additions) were identified The procedure was applied to both trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

30 Viktor Becher

translation-inherent type of explicitation in order to explain the addition of con-nectives in translation by pointing out when and why translators add connectives

The study was carried out on a bidirectional English-German translation cor-pus consisting of the following four quantitatively comparable subcorpora

1 English texts (21222 words)2 Their German translations (21808 words)3 German texts (21253 words)4 Their English translations (24474 words)

The texts contained in the corpus are business texts (mostly letters to sharehold-ers sampled from international companiesrsquo annual reports) that were published between 1993 and 2002 The corpus is quite small in terms of word count but since the lexical material is distributed across quite a large number of texts (86 short texts in total) mostly by different authorstranslators reliability should not be a problem

Turning to the studyrsquos object of investigation connectives are a good starting point for the investigation of explicitation in translation since they are regularly added and omitted by translators and their additionomission is generally easy to spot A connective is a conjunction sentence adverbial or particle that assigns semantic roles to clauses sentences or larger stretches of discourse (eg CausendashEffect) (cf Pasch et al 2003 Bluumlhdorn 2008) It is important to see that this is a functional (semantic) definition of the term connective It includes many different kinds of expressions to which we intuitively ascribe a connective function (eg firsthellipsecond however as a result) Nevertheless the definition is precise and easy to operationalize

Finally let us turn to the method that has been pursued in the present study In a close reading of all source texts contained in the corpus connectives were identified manually For each sentence containing a connective the correspond-ing target text sentence was searched carefully for possible translation equivalents taking into account not only obvious lexical equivalents (eg and mdash und lsquoandrsquo) but also syntactic constructions word order patterns etc that might be taken as reproducing the semantic effect of the connective in question In this way im-plicitations (= connective omissions) were identified Next using the same close-reading approach all target texts were manually scanned for connectives that have no equivalent in the corresponding source text segment In this way explicitations (= connective additions) were identified The procedure was applied to both trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 31

4 Quantitative results

Table 1 lists the frequency of connective additions and omissions in the two trans-lation directions represented in the corpus

Table 1 Frequency of connective additions and omissions in the corpus investigated

Eng rarr Ger Ger rarr Eng

additions 114 48

omissions 32 51

The table allows us to make the following two principal observations

1 The German target texts exhibit both more additions and fewer omissions of connectives than the English target texts This confirms a trend that has been observed in a number of contrastive investigations on the language pair Eng-lish-German namely that speakers of German tend towards a greater degree of cohesive explicitness than speakers of English (Becher 2009 Behrens 2005 Fabricius-Hansen 2005 House 2004 Stein 1979) Given this cross-linguistic contrast in communicative preferences the English-German translatorsrsquo stronger tendency to explicitate weaker tendency to implicitate (as compared to the German-English translators) is not surprising Certain well-known grammatical differences between English and German should contribute to this tendency For example German does not have a construction equivalent to the English ing-adjunct so we should expect English-German translators to lsquocompensatersquo by adding connectives (see Section 53 below)

2 Explicitations are not counterbalanced by implicitations ie the quantitative results confirm the Asymmetry Hypothesis for this data set A null hypothesis would postulate that what gets added in one translation direction should be omitted in the other2 With respect to Table 1 we should expect that since there are 114 connective additions in the direction English-German there should be about the same number of omissions in the direction German-English This is because if explicitation and implicitation were only due to the pragmatic and lexicogrammatical contrasts noted above German-English translators should throw out connectives to exactly the same extent that English-German trans-lators put them in However this is not the case In the following we are going to find out why

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

32 Viktor Becher

5 Qualitative Results

All additions and omissions of connectives were scrutinized in their respective contexts in order to find out why translators have performed the shifts in question The results suggest that we do not need the assumption of mysterious subcon-scious processes in the cognition of the translator (Olohan and Baker 2000) or as Blum-Kulka (1986 21) has put it a ldquouniversal strategy inherent in the process of language mediationrdquo in order to explain the frequent addition and omission of connectives in translation In total five different triggers of explicitationimplicita-tion involving connectives were identified In short translators addomit connec-tives in order to

1 Comply with the communicative norms of the target language community2 Exploit specific features of the target language system3 Deal with specific restrictions of the target language system4 Avoid stylistically marked ways of expression5 Optimize the cohesion of the target text

In the following I am going to present examples illustrating these five explicita-tionimplicitation triggers Due to lack of space I am only going to present exam-ples showing the addition of connectives Note that the same principles are at work in the omission of connectives (see Becher 2011a where the findings presented here are discussed in more detail)

51 Complying with communicative norms

The following example illustrates how translators sometimes insert connectives in order to comply with the communicative conventions of the target language community

(1) EngOrig We outperformed the S amp P 500 for the second consecutive year and wersquove now beaten the index nine years out of the past 11

GerTrans Zum zweiten Mal in Folge haben wir ein besseres Ergebnis erzielt als der S amp P 500 und den Index damit3 9 Mal in den letzten 11 Jahren geschlagen

Why did the translator of (1) add the causal connective adverb damit In a previous study using largely the same data as the present study I found that causal connec-tives seem to be considerably more frequent in German than in English business texts (Becher 2009) The item damit was found to be particularly frequent while English equivalents such as thus and therefore were found to hardly occur at all Thus it should come as no surprise that English-German translators regularly add

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 33

connectives among them damit which seems to be particularly popular among authors of German business texts Shifts such as the ones evidenced in (1) should be seen as resulting from translatorsrsquo application of what House (1997) has called a cultural filter

52 Exploiting features of the target language system

In this section we will look at some examples which suggest that translators some-times add connectives in an effort to make full use of the syntactic and lexical features that the target language system offers

(2) EngOrig Medical Systems used it to open up a commanding technology lead in several diagnostic platforms [hellip]

GerTrans Medical Systems zB [lsquofor examplersquo] hat dadurch seine technologische Fuumlhrungsposition bei diversen Diagnosesystemen erlangt [hellip]

In (2) the translator has added the connective zum Beispiel lsquofor examplersquo (abbre-viated as zB) in a specifically German syntactic slot called the Nacherstposition (lsquoafter-first positionrsquo) As its name suggests an element occupying the German Nacherstposition appears to be lsquotagged onrsquo to the first constituent of the sentence since elements filling this syntactic slot are integrated into the sentence prosodi-cally and syntactically (Breindl 2008) The syntax of English on the other hand does not offer a Nacherstposition Thus the insertion of for example in the second position of the English source text sentence would either be ambiguous seman-tically (Medical systems for example used ithellip)4 or would require a prosodically weighty and syntactically disintegrated parenthetical (Medical systems for exam-ple used ithellip) From this we see that the syntax of German due to the availability of the Nacherstposition allows a more flexible use of certain connectives than Eng-lish syntax Thus it should come as no surprise especially in connection with the above-mentioned norm of cohesive explicitness in German that English-German translators make use of this specifically German syntactic option as the translator of (2) has done

Here is another example of a translator exploiting a syntactic slot offered by German that is not available in English

(3) EngOrig Product services consisted of less-exciting maintenance of our high-value machines mdash turbines engines medical devices and the like

GerTrans Produktbezogene Dienstleistungen umfassen hingegen [lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo] weniger aufregende Aufgaben zB die Wartung hochwertiger Maschinen wie etwa Turbinen oder medizinischer Geraumlte

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

34 Viktor Becher

The translator of (3) has inserted the connective hingegen lsquoin contrast on the other handrsquo right after the finite verb a syntactic position that the grammar of English does not offer (cf Product services consisted in contrast of less-exciting mainte-nancehellip and Product services consisted of in contrast less-exciting maintenancehellip) The availability of this position is representative of a more general contrast be-tween English and German While the syntax of English makes it difficult at times to integrate adverbials into the syntactic frame of the sentence without interfering with information structure the German sentence is capable of absorbing a mul-titude of optional adverbials without problems (Doherty 2002 Fabricius-Hansen 2007 73)

Both English and German strive to follow the principles lsquoGiven before Newrsquo and lsquoBalanced Information Distributionrsquo (Doherty 2001 2002) But as Doherty shows German due to its relatively free word order is better able to comply with these principles Example (3) illustrates this If we try to insert in contrast (or a comparable one-word connective such as however) into the English source text sentence of (3) we note that no matter where we put the connective the discourse assumes a somewhat choppy quality either because one of the two above prin-ciples is violated or because the connective appears in a syntactic position that is prosodically and syntactically disintegrated (cf eg Product services in contrast consisted ofhellip) The syntax of German on the other hand offers a prosodically integrated syntactic slot right behind the verb where the insertion of a connective does not interfere with information-structural principles Thus it seems plausible to assume that it is this specific feature of German syntax that (in connection with the German preference for cohesive explicitness noted above) has encouraged the translator to add hingegen To put it somewhat informally one of the reasons why the translator of (3) has added hingegen is because he could

The next example to be discussed here illustrates the case where a translator exploits a specific lexical feature of the target language in adding the connective namely the connective itself

(4) EngOrig The bear market has undermined some investorsrsquo faith in stocks but it has not reduced the need to save for the future

GerTrans Das Vertrauen einiger Anleger in Aktien hat zwar [lsquocertainlyrsquo] angesichts der ruumlcklaumlufigen Boumlrsenmaumlrkte gelitten aber der Gedanke der Zukunftssicherung bleibt weiterhin das Gebot der Stunde

The connective added in (4) zwar does not have a direct equivalent in English Its meaning can only be approximated by paraphrases such as lsquocertainlyrsquo or lsquoit is true thatrsquo In German discourse zwar has the specific function of serving as an op-tional precursor to a concessive connective such as aber lsquobutrsquo or jedoch lsquohoweverrsquo marking the conceded part of the concessive structure (Koumlnig 1991) Thus upon

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 35

encountering zwar a German reader knows that a concessive connective has to follow (Primatarova-Miltscheva 1986) In this way zwar serves as an (additional) marker of discourse structure potentially easing processing for the reader (Becher 2011b)

In the corpus investigated translators regularly add zwar and this is anything but surprising Since English source texts do not contain expressions that could possibly be translated by means of zwar (except maybe rare occurrences of cer-tainly it is true that and the like) English-German translators who want to avoid lsquotranslationesersquo and make their target texts conform with what is considered a good style of writing in German have to insert the connective even in the absence of source text triggers In other words it seems plausible to assume that English-German translators insert zwar simply in order to make use of the full potential of the German lexicon

In this connection it has to be pointed out that the case of zwar is represen-tative of a much more general contrast between English and German German is a lsquoconnective languagersquo the Handbook of German Connectives (Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Pasch et al 2003) listing 334 such items (Waszligner 2001) mdash an impressive number To my knowledge there is no comparable statistic for English5 but the number of connectives will be much lower for this language not least because English has many fewer connective adverb compounds (such as therefore) than German (Becher 2010c) This leads us to an important point We see here a neat correspondence between the communicative norms the lexicon and the syntax of German The communicative norms of the language demand a high degree of cohesive explicitness the German lexicon provides a multitude of connectives that speakers may use to comply with these norms and the syntax of German offers a number of prosodically integrated syntactic slots that speakers may exploit to accommodate connectives elegantly

Of course there are also cases where the lexicogrammar of English offers a construction that German lacks While these cases are not as frequent as the ones discussed above they do lead to explicitation occasionally Cf the following ex-ample

(5) GerOrig Inzwischen werden konzernweit mehr als 1000 Projekte bearbeitet der Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer innerhalb des Konzerns wird von Tag zu Tag intensiver [hellip]

Gloss lsquoBy now more than 1000 projects are worked on the knowledge and experience transfer inside the Group is becoming more intensive from day to dayrsquo

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

36 Viktor Becher

EngTrans With more than 1000 projects now running throughout the Group the exchange of knowledge and experience among Group companies is intensifying daily [hellip]

The German source text of (5) has two asyndetically connected clauses which means that the reader has to infer the semantic connection between them Read-ers of the English target text on the other hand do not have to draw such an inference since the translator has inserted the connective with which fixes the semantic relation between the two connected clauses as one of lsquoconcomitancersquo6 I would argue that the translator has done this because she saw herself in a position where she could actually improve on the source text by exploiting a unique option of English lexicogrammar (the infinite with-clause)

To see where this argument goes let us try to back-translate the English target text sentence to German First of all we note that German does not have a connec-tive equivalent in syntax and semantics to the English with-clause We could try a connection with waumlhrend lsquowhilersquo but that would be too lsquostrongrsquo a translation since waumlhrend is more specific semantically than with (see Becher 2011a) We could also try a paratactic connection by means of und lsquoandrsquo but that would be too lsquoweakrsquo a translation since und is even less specific than with (cf Lang 1991 614f) Thus for example und may be taken to encode a relation of similarity (Bluumlhdorn 2010) an interpretation that with lacks The brief discussion above is intended to illustrate that no matter what we do we cannot exactly reproduce the meaning of with in German

I do not want to digress into further discussion of possible German transla-tion equivalents of the English with-clause Rather my point here is that the lexi-cogrammar of German does not offer a connective that matches the interpretive potential of the German source text But the German-English translator has actu-ally come up with a connective that exactly fits the context at hand namely with Thus we can say that first the translator of (5) has managed to convey a meaning in the English target text that would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convey in German Second in doing so the translator has exploited a lsquotypically Englishrsquo lexicogrammatical item Both of these observations suggest plausible reasons for the addition of with by the translator

53 Dealing with restrictions of the target language system

Another trigger of explicitation that qualitative analysis has identified is the lack of certain target language features Translators tend to add connectives when they face certain source language constructions that do not have a close equivalent in the target language One of these constructions is the English ing-adjunct which

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 37

regularly motivates explicitation in English-German translations (see also Becher 2010b Becher 2011a) The following example illustrates this

(6) EngOrig Throughout the world our operating divisions are sharing service facilities and administrative offices wherever appropriate saving tens of millions in field operating costs

GerTrans Uumlberall in der Welt nutzen unsere Betriebsabteilungen Einrichtungen und Buumlros gemeinsam wo immer dies sinnvoll ist und sparen dadurch Millionen an Betriebskosten vor Ort ein

Gloss lsquohellipand in this way save millions in field operating costsrsquo

The English source text sentence of (6) contains an ing-adjunct (savinghellip) a con-struction whose vague meaning covers a broad spectrum ranging from temporal sequence to concession (cf Quirk et al 1985 1124) In this case the construc-tion invites a causal reading (see Behrens 1999 on how this comes about) and the translator is faced with a problem the lexicogrammar of German does not offer a construction syntactically and semantically equivalent to the English ing-adjunct She thus decides to lsquopromotersquo the ing-adjunct to a regular finite main clause which she coordinates to the preceding clause by means of und lsquoandrsquo In order to pre-serve the causal interpretation invited by the source textrsquos ing-adjunct she decides to add the causalinstrumental connective dadurch lsquothus in this wayrsquo This is of course an explicitation since the ing-adjunct does not have to be read as express-ing causation mdash although this is the most plausible reading But what else could the translator have done Not adding a connective such as dadurch would have resulted in a loss of linguistically encoded meaning so explicitation seems to be the most sensible option here The above considerations suggest that the translator of (6) has added dadurch primarily in order to compensate for a restriction of Ger-man morphosyntax (as compared to English) namely the lack of a construction comparable to the English ing-adjunct in its semantics

Let us now have a look at an example of a compensating connective addition in the other translation direction German-English

(7) GerOrig [Wir haben eine uumlberschaubare Zahl globaler Marken auf deren Pflege wir uns konzentrieren] [hellip] Strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen

Gloss lsquoOpportunities for strategic acquisitions will we usersquo EngTrans [We have a manageable number of global brands and we

concentrate on managing and developing them] [hellip] We will also take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisitions

Why did the German-English translator of (7) add the connective also To an-swer this question we need to have a close look at the word order of the German

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

38 Viktor Becher

source text sentence (which has been preserved in the gloss provided) We see that the object of the sentence strategische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten lsquoopportunities for strategic acquisitionsrsquo comes first in the linear ordering of syntactic constituents This is possible because German is not an SV (SubjectndashVerb) language like Eng-lish but what may be called an XV language In German not only the subject but (almost) any syntactic constituent (represented by lsquoXrsquo) may precede the verb and thus form the first part of the sentence (Koumlnig and Gast 2009 181) When another constituent than the subject precedes the verb in a German sentence (eg object optional or obligatory adverbial etc) one speaks of fronting or topicalization the fronted consituent being called a sentence topic or simply topic This syntactically determined notion of topic is not to be confused with the topic of a discourse or discourse topic (see below)

When speakers of German topicalize a syntactic constituent they generally do this for a specific pragmatic purpose Buumlring (1999) distinguishes between three different kinds of sentence topics according to their pragmatic function contras-tive topics partial topics and purely implicational topics In (7) we are dealing with a partial topic The topicalization of the constituent preceding the verb here signals that the sentence topic forms part of a larger group of things to be talked about in the discourse In other words the topicalization signals that the sentence topic addresses only part of the overarching discourse topic Cf the following (in-vented) discourse

(8) Speaker A Hast du den Abwasch gemacht den Muumlll rausgebracht und deine Hausaufgaben gemacht

Gloss lsquoDid you wash the dishes take out the garbage and do your homeworkrsquo

Speaker B Den Abwasch habe ich gemacht Den Muumlll habe ich rausgebracht Aber meine Hausaufgaben habe ich nicht gemacht

Gloss lsquoThe dishes I washed The garbage I took out But my homework I did not dorsquo

Suggested English translation I washed the dishes I also took out the garbage But I didnrsquot do my homework

In the little discourse given in (8) speaker A establishes the discourse topic lsquothings I told you to dorsquo by asking a question In her answer speaker B uses a topicalized object (functioning as a partial topic) in every one of her three sentences She uses partial topics in order to signal that each sentence answers only part of the dis-course topic Partial topics may thus be seen as a genuine cohesive device mdash akin to connectives In English topicalization is not available as a means of signaling that a sentence forms part of a list-like structure that addresses a single discourse topic Thus an English translation of speaker Brsquos utterance either has to do without

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 39

explicit topic management devices or it can make use of a connective such as also which makes explicit that the sentence containing the connective forms part of a larger list-like complex addressing a single discourse topic This is what the trans-lator of (7) has done

The discourse topic of (7) may be taken to be lsquothings that the company author-ing the report intends to dorsquo with each of the two sentences addressing one part of the discourse topic First the company plans to manage and develop its global brands second it wants to take advantage of opportunities for strategic acquisi-tions In the German source text of (7) the fact that the second sentence (Strate-gische Akquisitionsmoumlglichkeiten werden wir nutzen) continues the discourse topic of the preceding one is marked by means of topicalization The German-English translator however does not have access to this purely syntactic cohesive device He has to stick with SV word order but he inserts a connective (also) to prevent a loss of cohesion vis-agrave-vis the source text mdash a skilled translation choice perfectly justifiable by the English-German syntactic contrast discussed above We can thus say that the addition of a connective evidenced in (7) was performed by the trans-lator in order to compensate for a lsquomissingrsquo feature of the target language system

54 Avoiding stylistically marked ways of expression

Several translation scholars have suggested that translations tend to be more ldquoho-mogenousrdquo ldquoconventionalrdquo or ldquostandardizedrdquo than non-translated texts ie they tend to ldquogravitate towards the center of a continuumrdquo and to ldquomove away from extremesrdquo (Baker 1996 185f) Baker (1996) has referred to this alleged tendency of translators as ldquoleveling outrdquo Laviosa (1998) has used the term ldquoconvergencerdquo and Toury (1995) assumes a ldquolaw of growing standardizationrdquo for translated text7 In-deed there is some evidence suggesting that translations make use of more high-frequency words and fewer ad-hoc word coinages than non-translated texts (Lavi-osa 1998 Olohan 2004 108ff) While I think it would be misleading to call leveling out a (possible) ldquotranslation universalrdquo (Baker 1996)8 the translators in my corpus too do exhibit a tendency to explicitate in order to make their texts comply with standard conventional target language usage Cf the following example

(8) EngOrig We are better prepared today than at any other time to compete to balance the paradoxical demands of the future marketplace to earn the loyalty of consumers worldwide

GerTrans Wir sind heute besser denn je darauf vorbereitet im Wettbewerb mitzuhalten die widerspruumlchlichen Anforderungen kuumlnftiger Maumlrkte zu erfuumlllen und [lsquoandrsquo] uns weltweit das Vertrauen der Verbraucher zu verdienen

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

40 Viktor Becher

The English source text of (8) makes use of asyndesis as a mdash stylistically marked mdash rhetorical device intended to highlight three alleged capabilities of the company in question (to compete mdash to balance mdash to earn) The English-German transla-tor however has turned asyndesis into syndesis by inserting und lsquoandrsquo thus doing away with the rhetorical markedness of the text It is plausible to assume that the translatorrsquos main aim behind this move was to make the target text appear more conventional or lsquonormalrsquo in this way avoiding the risk of delivering a translation that does not meet the acceptance of clients or readers (cf the next section)

55 Optimizing the cohesion of the target text

The data investigated were found to contain some instances of explicitation that could not be explained with recourse to the four reasons discussed above In this section I am going to argue that this should not worry us at all In fact we should expect to find such instances of explicitation in most (but not all mdash see below) translated texts Let us begin by looking at a concrete example

(9) GerOrig Flexible Preismodelle und Biet-Verfahren sind unter Kaufleuten seit jeher uumlblich Mit der Globalisierung der Maumlrkte ist ein Verfahren noumltig mit dem Produkte weltweit angeboten werden koumlnnen

EngTrans Flexible pricing models and bidding procedures have always been the norm among business people However the globalization of the markets means that a procedure is now necessary whereby products can be offered world-wide

We do not see an immediate reason (eg in terms of cross-linguistic differences) why the translator of (9) has inserted however But that does not need to worry us since we should expect translators to add a connective once in a while The reason for this is that translators are mediators between cultures Their job is to ensure understanding between the source text author and her target text readers If un-derstanding does not occur clients and readers will tend to blame the translator for not having done his job properly If the source text itself is not understandable that is the translatorrsquos problem Clients and target language readers often do not care about the source text they just want an understandable translation The task of the translator is thus characterized by a great deal of risk mdash the risk of losing cli-ents of receiving complaints from target language readers etc (Pym 2005 2008) It follows that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding not hesitating to deviate from the source text where intelligibility could be improved In particular translators should not hesitate to add connectives

To understand a text as an intentional communicative act means to recog-nize its coherence ie to understand what every individual segment (eg sentence

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 41

paragraph etc) contributes to the overarching communicative purpose of the text or ldquodiscourse purposerdquo (see Grosz and Sidner 1986 for some insightful consider-ations on what constitutes a textdiscourse and how to define coherence) If a read-er fails to see the connections between individual segments and the discourse pur-pose the result is a failure to understand the text as a purposeful communicative event Connectives are an important means of making such connections explicit a means of making the reader see the coherence of a text The view of translators as risk-avoiding mediators between cultures proposed by Pym (2005 2008) and adopted here should make us expect that translators tend to be very concerned about cohesion which may be defined as the overt marking of coherence relations And this in turn should make it come as no surprise that translators (a) insert cohesive devices mdash such as connectives mdash more frequently than they leave them out and (b) insert connectives even in places where there is no specific trigger or motivation to do so (such as in (9))

In recent conference presentations that I have given on the topic of explicita-tion I have heard the complaint that Pymrsquos notion of translators as risk-avoiders would be just as mysterious an explanation for instances of explicitation such as (9) as the assumption of a ldquouniversal strategyrdquo (Blum-Kulka 1986) or ldquosubconscious processesrdquo (Olohan and Baker 2000) of explicitation However this objection to my line of argumentation is not valid The notion of translators as risk-avoiders is supported by general pragmatic properties of human communication In gen-eral communicators should tend to be too explicit rather than too implicit where understanding might be at risk (Heltai 2005 67 Becher 2010a 18ff) In contrast the assumption of certain cognitive properties of the translation process that are supposed to cause explicitation is not supported at all given the current state of research in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

6 Putting everything together

Let us now put together the quantitative and qualitative results discussed in the previous sections In Section 4 (Quantitative Results) we made two observations First we found that in the corpus investigated there are considerably more explic-itations in the direction English-German than in the direction German-English The qualitative analysis presented in Section 5 has suggested two reasons for this

a The discourse norms of the German language in general and of the business genre in particular demand a higher degree of cohesive explicitness than the corresponding English norms

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

42 Viktor Becher

b The lexicogrammatical system of German favors the use of connectives One could say that it invites the use of connectives both by providing a large lexi-cal inventory of connectives and by offering a variety of syntactic slots for ac-commodating them (This of course fits in nicely with the observation that the communicative norms of German demand a high degree of cohesive explicit-ness)

Second we found that in both translation directions explicitations are not coun-terbalanced by implicitations as predicted by Klaudyrsquos Asymmetry Hypothesis Again our qualitative analysis has suggested two reasons

a As risk-avoiding mediators between cultures translators should tend to go to great lengths to optimize cohesion thus trying to reduce the risk of misunder-standing

b There are certain constructions that tend to trigger the addition of connec-tives For example the English ing-adjunct regularly prompts the addition of connectives in translations into German (see Section 53) In contrast the omission of a connective is never prompted ie there are no specific triggers for connective omissions For example a German-English translator may omit a connective and substitute an ing-adjunct (eg in an effort to make use of the full range of lexicogrammatical options that English offers cf Section 52) but she does not have to In contrast an English-German translator facing an ing-adjunct has a problem since German does not offer an equivalent con-struction and the insertion of a connective is one of the most salient solutions if not the most salient one

7 The bottom Line

In the introduction to this article I said that a main aim of the study presented here was to show that we do not need a mysterious notion of translation-inherence agrave la Blum-Kulka (1986) in order to explain the frequent occurrence of explicitation in translation and I hope that the little synthesis of quantitative and qualitative re-sults provided above has at least partly accomplished this aim In particular I hope to have shown that many instances of explicitation that may seem enigmatic at first in fact go back to not-at-all-enigmatic previously established cross-linguistic differences in terms of syntax lexis and communicative norms And it is our task as translation scholars to be aware of these contrasts and to identify their effects in the corpora we investigate

Clearly this is not an easy task It involves finding and reading literature from neighboring disciplines such as linguistic typology contrastive linguistics and

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 43

cross-cultural pragmatics And unfortunately it also involves carrying out onersquos own contrastive investigation once in a while where previous research is not avail-able But I hope to have shown that this task is unavoidable if we want to find out what is really inherent to translation and what is not (Another task that needs to be accomplished in translation studies viz in the field of translation process research is to devise models of the cognitive processes underlying translation that are supported by psycholinguistic evidence Once we have such models we can use them to generate well-motivated hypotheses concerning the cognitive founda-tions of explicitation and implicitation)

I am sure that there will be readers who disagree with some of my qualita-tive analyses in Section 5 and with the confidence with which I ascribe certain observations to lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts between English and German I invite these readers to voice their criticism and to propose alternative analyses But I would also like to point out that this kind of criticism will not con-cern the main point that has been made in this article namely that in any given source languagendashtarget language pair there will be a number of deep-seated non-trivial lexicogrammatical and pragmatic contrasts mdash many of which we do not even know yet mdash which will inevitably lead to instances of explicitation that are difficult or even impossible to explain given the current state of research Nev-ertheless it is wrong (and somewhat lazy) to simply attribute these instances to an allegedly universal strategy inherent in the process of language mediation a pseudo-explanation that does not explain anything but only raises new problems Instead we should dig deeper and try to come up with real explanations namely explanations in terms of language-specific discourse norms (Section 51) lexico-grammar (Sections 52 and 53) and the sociolinguistic parameters influencing translatorsrsquo choices (Sections 54 and 55) Only if this does not succeed should we turn to more complex and elusive cognitive explanations such as the one envis-aged by Blum-Kulkarsquos Explicitation Hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The study presented in this article was carried out within the project Covert Translation (prin-cipal investigator Juliane House) located at the University of Hamburgrsquos Research Center on Multilingualism The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Re-search Foundation) whom I thank for their generous support I would also like to thank Juliane House Svenja Kranich Kirsten Malmkjaeligr and Erich Steiner for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

44 Viktor Becher

Notes

1 Implicitness may be defined as the non-verbalization of information that the addressee might be able to infer (cf the definition of explicitness offered at the beginning of this article) Implici-tation may then be defined as an increase in implicitness in translation

2 An exception to this are cases where explicitations are obligatory in one translation direction while implicitations in the other direction are optional For example Hungarian-English trans-lators regularly have to add subject pronouns (to achieve a grammatical sentence) while their English-Hungarian colleagues may mdash but do not have to mdash omit these items (Klaudy 2009) Such cases did not occur in the present study

3 The connective additions under consideration have been italicized in the corpus examples

4 The ambiguity is between the following two readings lsquoMedical Systems is an example of a company who used ithelliprsquo vs lsquoAn example of how Medical Systems used it ishelliprsquo In the first read-ing several businesses have used x (the referent of it whose identity is not important here) and Medical Systems is an example of such a business In the second reading Medical Systems has put x to different uses and lsquoto open up a commanding technology leadhelliprsquo is an example of such a use In the German translation of (2) the ambiguity does not arise because the occurrence of zB lsquofor examplersquo in the Nacherstposition unambiguously selects the first reading

5 Halliday and Hasan (1976 242f) list 122 examples of ldquoconjunctive elementsrdquo available in Eng-lish Halliday and Matthiessen (2004 542f) provide a list of 119 ldquoconjunctive Adjunctsrdquo and Quirk et al (1985 634ndash636) list 144 ldquocommon conjunctsrdquo for English When comparing these figures to the number of German connectives given in the Handbook of German Connectives (334 items) it is important to note that the inclusion criteria used by the authors of the Hand-book are much stricter than the ones used by the above-quoted authors writing on English On the other hand the latter authors did not aim for completeness in compiling their lists Thus it remains unclear how far the statistics cited are comparable

6 With may also be lsquooverinterpretedrsquo as encoding a causal relation (cf Quirk et al 1985 564) but this does not need to concern us here since asyndetic connections such as the one present in the German source text of (5) may also be interpreted causally (cf Breindl and Waszligner 2006)

7 Cf also Kennyrsquos (1998) notion of ldquosanitizationrdquo

8 I think the very notion of lsquotranslation universalrsquo itself is misleading since much of what has been assumed to be universally characteristic of translation may in fact be attributed to general (non-translation-specific) pragmatic features of linguistic communication (House 2008 Pym 2008 Becher 2010a)

References

Baker Mona 1996 ldquoCorpus-based translation studies The challenges that lie aheadrdquo Harold Somers ed Terminology LSP and translation Studies in language engineering in honor of Juan C Sager Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins 1996 175ndash186

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

When and why do translators add connectives 45

Becher Viktor 2009 ldquoThe explicit marking of contingency relations in English and German texts A contrastive analysisrdquo Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguis-tica Europaea workshop Connectives across languages Explicitation and grammaticaliza-tion of contingency relations httpwwwfrancaisugentbeindexphpid=19amptype=file (13 May 2010)

Becher Viktor 2010a ldquoAbandoning the notion of lsquotranslation-inherentrsquo explicitation Against a dogma of translation studiesrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 111 1ndash28

Becher Viktor 2010b ldquoTowards a more rigorous treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in translation studiesrdquo trans-kom 31 1ndash25

Becher Viktor 2010c ldquoDifferences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German textsrdquo Linguistics 48(4) 1309ndash1342

Becher Viktor 2011a Explicitation and implicitation in translation A corpus-based study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts PhD dissertation Uni-versity of Hamburg

Becher Viktor 2011b ldquoVon der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konz-essivitaumlt in neueren populaumlrwissenschaftlichen Textenrdquo Eva Breindl Gisella Ferraresi and Anna Volodina eds Satzverknuumlpfungen Zur Interaktion von Form Bedeutung und Diskurs-funktion Berlin-New York Walter de Gruyter 2011

Behrens Bergljot 1999 ldquoA dynamic semantic approach to translation assessment ING-parti-cipial adjuncts and their translation in Norwegianrdquo Monika Doherty ed Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung Berlin Akademie-Verlag 1999 90ndash112

Behrens Bergljot 2005 ldquoCohesive ties in translation A contrastive study of the Norwegian con-nective dermedrdquo Languages in Contrast 51 3ndash32

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2008 ldquoOn the syntax and semantics of sentence connectivesrdquo Mannheim Institut fuumlr Deutsche Sprache unpublished manuscript httpwwwids-mannheimdegratexteblu_connectivespdf (24 August 2010)

Bluumlhdorn Hardarik 2010 ldquoSemantische Unterbestimmtheit bei Konnektorenrdquo Pohl Inge ed Semantische Unbestimmtheit im Lexikon Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang 2010 205ndash221

Blum-Kulka Shoshana 1986 ldquoShifts of cohesion and coherence in tanslationrdquo Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka eds Interlingual and intercultural communication Tuumlbingen Gunter Narr 1986 17ndash35

Breindl Eva 2008 ldquoDie Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen Gebundene Topiks im Deutschenrdquo Eva Breindl and Maria Thurmair eds Erkenntnisse vom Rande Zur Interak-tion von Prosodie Informationsstruktur Syntax und Bedeutung Zugleich Festschrift fuumlr Hans Altmann zum 65 Geburtstag [Themenheft Deutsche Sprache 12008] 2008 27ndash49

Breindl Eva and Ulrich H Waszligner 2006 ldquoSyndese vs Asyndese Konnektoren und andere Wegweiser fuumlr die Interpretation semantischer Relationen in Textenrdquo Hardarik Bluumlhdorn Eva Breindl and Ulrich Hermann Waszligner eds Text mdash Verstehen Grammatik und daruumlber hinaus BerlinndashNew York Walter de Gruyter [Jahrbuch des Instituts fuumlr Deutsche Sprache 2005] 2006 46ndash70

Buumlring Daniel 1999 ldquoTopicrdquo Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt eds Focus mdash linguistic cognitive and computational perspectives Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 142ndash165

Doherty Monika 2001 ldquoDiscourse relators and the beginnings of sentences in English and Ger-manrdquo Languages in Contrast 32 223ndash251

Doherty Monika 2002 Language processing in discourse A key to felicitous translation LondonndashNew York Routledge

46 Viktor Becher

Fabricius-Hansen Cathrine 2005 ldquoElusive connectives A case study on the explicitness dimen-sion of discourse coherencerdquo Linguistics 431 17ndash48

Fabricius-Hansen Cathrine 2007 ldquoDreimal (nicht) dasselbe Sprachliche Perspektivierung im Deutschen Norwegischen und Englischenrdquo Zeitschrift fuumlr Literaturwissenschaft und Lin-guistik 145 61ndash86

Goumlpferich Susanne and Riitta Jaumlaumlskelaumlinen 2009 Process research into the development of translation competence Where are we and where do we need to go Across Languages and Cultures 102 169ndash191

Grosz Barbara J and Candace L Sidner 1986 ldquoAttention intentions and the structure of dis-courserdquo Computational Linguistics 12 175ndash204

Halliday Michael AK and Ruqaiya Hasan 1976 Cohesion in English London LongmanHalliday Michael AK and Christian MIM Matthiessen 2004 An introduction to functional

grammar 3rd edition London ArnoldHansen-Schirra Silvia Stella Neumann and Erich Steiner 2007 Cohesive explicitness and ex-

plicitation in an English-German translation corpus Languages in Contrast 72 241ndash265Heltai Paacutel 2005 ldquoExplicitation redundancy ellipsis and translationrdquo Krisztina Kaacuteroly and

Aacutegota Foacuteris eds New trends in translation studies In honour of Kinga Klaudy Budapest Akadeacutemiai Kiadoacute 2005 24ndash74

House Juliane 1997 Translation quality assessment A model revisited Tuumlbingen Gunter NarrHouse Juliane 2004 ldquoExplicitness in discourse across languagesrdquo Juliane House Werner Koller

and Klaus Schubert eds Neue Perspektiven in der Uumlbersetzungs- und Dolmetschwissen-schaft Bochum AKS 2004 185ndash208

House Juliane 2008 ldquoBeyond intervention Universals in translationrdquo trans-kom 11 6ndash19Kenny Dorothy 1998 ldquoCreatures of habit What translators usually do with wordsrdquo Meta 434

515ndash523Klaudy Kinga 2008 ldquoExplicitationrdquo Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha eds Routledge Ency-

clopedia of Translation Studies LondonndashNew York Routledge 104ndash108Klaudy Kinga 2009 ldquoThe asymmetry hypothesis in translation researchrdquo Rodicia Dimitriu and

Miriam Shlesinger eds Translators and their readers In Homage to Eugene A Nida Brus-sels Les Editions du Hazard 2009 283ndash303

Klaudy Kinga and Krisztina Kaacuteroly 2005 ldquoImplicitation in translation Empirical evidence for operational asymmetry in translationrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 61 13ndash28

Koumlnig Ekkehard 1991 ldquoConcessive relations as the dual of causal relationsrdquo Dietmar Zaefferer ed Semantic universals and universal semantics BerlinndashNew YorkndashDordrecht Foris Publi-cations 1991 190ndash209

Koumlnig Ekkehard amp Volker Gast 2009 Understanding English-German contrasts Berlin Erich Schmidt

Konšalovaacute Petra 2007 ldquoExplicitation as a universal in syntactic decondensationrdquo Across Lan-guages and Cultures 81 17ndash32

Lang Ewald 1991 ldquoKoordinierende Konjunktionenrdquo Arnim von Stechow and Dieter Wun-derlich eds SemantikSemantics Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenoumlssischen Forsc-hung Walter de Gruyter Berlin-New York 1991 597ndash623

Laviosa Sara 1998 ldquoCore patterns of lexical use in a comparable corpus of English narrative proserdquo Meta 434 557ndash570

Olohan Maeve 2004 Introducing corpora in translation studies London and New York Rout-ledge

When and why do translators add connectives 47

Olohan Maeve and Mona Baker 2000 ldquoReporting that in translated English Evidence for sub-conscious processes of explicitationrdquo Across Languages and Cultures 12 141ndash158

Oslashverarings Linn 1998 ldquoIn search of the third code An investigation of norms in literary transla-tionrdquo Meta 434 557ndash-570

Paacutepai Vilma 2004 ldquoExplicitation a universal of translated textrdquo Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamaumlki eds Translation universals Do they exist Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Ben-jamins 2004 143ndash164

Pasch Renate Ursula Brauszlige Eva Breindl and Ulrich H Waszligner 2003 Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren Berlin and New York Walter de Gruyter

Primatarova-Miltscheva Antoinette 1986 ldquoZwar hellip aber mdash ein zweiteiliges Konnektivumrdquo Deutsche Sprache 142 125ndash139

Pym Anthony 2005 ldquoExplaining explicitationrdquo Krisztina Kaacuteroly and Aacutegota Foacuteris eds New trends in translation studies In honour of Kinga Klaudy Budapest Akadeacutemiai Kiadoacute 2005 29ndash34

Pym Anthony 2008 ldquoOn Touryrsquos laws of how translators translaterdquo Anthony Pym Miriam Sh-lesinger and Daniel Simeoni eds Beyond descriptive translation studies AmsterdamndashPhila-delphia John Benjamins 311ndash328

Quirk Randolph Sidney Greenbaum Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik 1985 A comprehensive grammar of the English language London Longman

Waszligner Ulrich H 2001 ldquoKonnektoren und Anaphorika mdash zwei grundlegende sprachliche Mit-tel zur Herstellung von Zusammenhang zwischen Textteilenrdquo Alain Cambourian ed Text-konnektoren und andere textstrukturiernde Einheiten Tuumlbingen Stauffenburg 2001 33ndash46

Stein Dieter 1979 ldquoZur Satzkonnektion im Englischen und Deutschen Ein Beitrag zu einer kontrastiven Vertextungslinguistikrdquo Folia Linguistica 13 303ndash319

Toury Gideon 1995 Descriptive translation studies and beyond Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins

Authorrsquos address

Viktor BecherUniversitaumlt HamburgSFB 538 MehrsprachigkeitK4 Covert TranslationMax-Brauer-Allee 6022765 HAMBURG (Germany)

viktorbecheruni-hamburgde