Ellipses, Conjunctions, and Substitutions: Which One Becomes Explicit in the Process of Translation?

It is widely believed in the field of translation studies that explicitation is one of the universals of translation. As Blum-Kulka (2001) and Baker (1996) depicted, all translated texts exhibit a higher degree of explicitness than nontranslated target-language texts of a comparable type. Moreover, as noted by Blum-Kulka (2001), translated texts are cohesively more explicit than nontranslated texts. Numerous studies done in the field of translation studies have proved this long-standing stance. These studies include Baker and Olohan (2000) and Papai (2001), just to name a few. However, very few studies have shown the proportion of each cohesive marker's level of explicitness to the total level of explicitness of a text. This study is an attempt to show which cohesive markers, according to Halliday's notion of cohesion in English, tend to be more explicit and which cohesive markers tend to be less explicit in the translated texts. In order to carry out the study, a corpus of over 85,000 words was chosen. All of the instances of cohesive markers, that is, ellipses, substitutions, and conjunctions, were identified in the original texts. After that, the ways in which the translators encountered these cohesive markers were studied. Finally, it is reported that the cohesive markers do not behave the same when undergoing the process of explicitation. The results of the present study suggest that conjunctions tend to be more explicit in translated texts than other cohesive markers in English to Persian translation.

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