Why typology matters: a corpus-based study of explicitation and implicitation of Manner-of-motion in narrative texts

Abstract

[EN] This research highlights the importance of linguistic typology to our understanding of translation universals. It tests two potential universals: process-oriented implicitation and product-oriented explicitation. Drawing on the hypothesis of thinking-for-translating, this paper analyses these universals in terms of the expression of Manner-of-motion, one of the semantic components which displays asymmetries between satellite-framed languages (e.g. Germanic languages) and verb-framed languages (e.g. Romance languages). The corpus-based method used here includes a German > Spanish parallel corpus of narrative texts and a comparable corpus in Spanish. The results confirm, on the one hand, that translations into Spanish are more implicit regarding Manner-of-motion than their corresponding German originals, and on the other hand, that these translations present a higher degree of explicitness of Manner-of-motion than comparable texts originally written in Spanish. These findings indicate that linguistic typology is key when studying translation universals, especially in intertypological scenarios, in which both the source and target languages have an impact on translation. In an attempt to systematise the resulting data, the validated universals have been reorganized into an explicitation ¿ implicitation cline.