Cohesion and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus

In translation studies, cohesive features as indicators for explicitation have been analysed either in an example-based way (Blum-Kulka 1986) or as concordances in monolingually comparable corpora of raw text (Olohan & Baker 2000). Where this is done without taking into account the source texts, the interpretation of explicitation remains restricted and problematic. Work on translations against a more linguistic background has addressed some of these restrictions and problems (cf. relevant work as in Johansson & Oksefjell eds. 1998; Fabricius-Hansen 1999); the focus of these research interests and methodologies is however different from ours. The basic assumption for the analysis of explicitation in the present paper is that the element that is explicitated in the target text has to be present implicitly in a linguistically traceable way in the source text and vice versa for implicitated elements. Explicitation is thus defined as a relationship and a process between instantiated and aligned pieces of translated texts. Furthermore, we stratify the notion of explicitation according to the linguistic levels of lexicogrammar and cohesion. As this stratification is still too abstract to be directly quantified on linguistic data in an electronic corpus, a series of further micro-level operationalisations is undertaken which are meant to bring the relevant phenomena down to an empirically measurable level