Analysis of explicitation evidence in technical translation

Abstract

[EN] The aim of this study is to contribute to Translation Studies in Higher Education by analyzing a parallel corpus containing German and Portuguese technical texts. Based on a text-linguistic perspective, we propose to explore in what way explicitation can be identified in the analysed text corpus, consisting of 15 user manuals from the field of electrical engineering. The corpus comprises 2100 aligned text segments, which were analysed in SketchEngine, a tool for corpus analysis. In the context of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), and based on the transfer instances identified in the parallel corpus analysis, we aim at providing a categorization of explicitation for practical translation classes. In our study, we discuss four categories, namely overspecification, specification, implicitation, and underspecification, depending on a decreasing explicitation degree. In terms of quantitative analysis, the corpus revealed that most instances were attributed to both underspecification and specification. Although user manuals are a highly conventionalized text genre with little room for variation, we found that explicitation elements constituted an important device in the transfer process.