Evidence of Explicitation in Texts Translated from English into Korean: A Corpus-based Pilot Study

Abstract

Using a small parallel corpus of student and professional translations, this paper examines the phenomenon of explicitation in texts translated from English into Korean. It discusses previous studies on the notion of explicitation and provides a brief description of the software tool and data to be analyzed. Based on the assumption that student and professional texts differ and that the degree of difference depends on the type of explicitation, it further attempts to examine the different levels of explicitation in texts produced by both student translators and a professional translator. This paper adopts the classification of explicitation provided by Klaudy (2001). Of the four types of explicitation, obligatory, optional, pragmatic, and translation-inherent, this paper focuses on obligatory and pragmatic ones. The data used here are authentic data obtained from translation classes from a graduate school and from a professional translator. The paper focuses on the translation of three free modifier phrases in student and professional translations for the potential traces of obligatory explicitation. For the analysis of pragmatic explicitation, the paper focuses on two metonyms containing cultural information and one cultural expression. The findings support the evidence of explicitation as one of the common features of translated texts both in student and professional translations. In terms of the different level of explicitation, however, it is hard to make any generalization as only one professional translation is used while there are twenty student translations. Obtaining more than one commissioned, professional translation is virtually impossible for a non-literary text as only one is needed for publication. For greater reliability, in the future, it might be worthwhile to have more translations done simply to use them in analysis.