Additions and omissions

con-text (e.g. cause (p, q), where p and q represent states of affairs). In this section we are concerned with shifts that do the same, but without any interactional or cohesive function. I call these shiftsdenotational.

The category of denotational shifts should not be mistaken as a kind of

‘trash category’ where shifts without a discernible function are collected.

In fact, the opposite is the case: Denotational shifts do have clearly iden-tifiable functions. While interactional shifts are concerned with the ver-balization of author–reader relationships and cohesive shifts with the co-hesion of the target text, denotational shifts demonstrate translators’ concern for describing states of affairs in a way that complies with the requirements of the current speech situation (taking into account the communicative norms of the target language, etc.) The fact that what I call denotational shifts have this observable communicative function (cf. Chapter 6) shows that shifts of this kind represent a pragmatic category of their own, not just a remainder of phenomena that do not fit in elsewhere.

In denotational shifts, it is particularly important to distinguish be-tween additions/omissions on the one hand and substitutions on the other. Let me briefly explain in the following how these operations dif-fer from each other in terms of their effect on the target text’s degree of explicitness. For the sake of brevity, I am going to focus on explicitating shifts.

of affairs expressed by the noun. Why is this an explicitation (and not a deviation from the source text)? The noun collaboration expresses the state of affairs collaborate (x, y), where x collaborates with y. In the source text, the participants x and y are left implicit. The reader has to infer from the context that the collaboration talked about takes place between the author of the text (x) and aircraft manufacturers (y). The reader of the target text, on the other hand, only has to infer the value of the variable x, because y is specified by the prepositional phrase with manufacturers.

The addition of with manufacturers in (39) is an explicitation (and not an addition of genuinely new information) because it further specifies a state of affairs expressed by the surrounding discourse.

The second case mentioned above is illustrated by the following exam-ple:

(40) Vorstand und Aufsichtsrat nehmen die positive

Geschäftsentwicklung zum Anlass, der Hauptversammlung eine gegenüber dem Vorjahr erhöhte Dividende [. . . ] vorzuschlagen.

Based on the positive business trend, the Board of Management and Supervisory Board propose to the Annual General Meetingthe payment of an increased dividend [. . . ].

Simplifying somewhat, the English source text’s subordinate clause ex-presses the state of affairs:

propose (board, increased_dividend, general_meeting)

By addingthe payment of, the translator of (40) has expressed an additional state of affairs, viz. pay (x, increased_dividend, y), where we infer that x = the company issuing the report and y = the company’s sharehold-ers. Why is this an explicitation? Because the additional state of affairs is inferable from the state of affairs verbalized by the source text: It is char-acteristic of a dividend that it gets paid out to shareholders. The addition ofthe payment of by the translator of (40) is an explicitation because it ex-presses an additional state of affairs that would be inferable if it were not verbalized.

The mechanisms outlined above also work the other way round, i.e.

translators may omit states of affairs or individual participants from the target text that can be assumed to be inferable by the reader. Cf. the fol-lowing example of a denotational omission:

(41) Die NHTSA ist außerdemvom Gesetzgeberangehalten worden, Fahrdynamiktests zu entwickeln [. . . ].

The NHTSA has also been required to develop stability tests [. . . ].

The German source text of (41) expresses the following state of affairs:

require (legislator, develop (NHTSA, stability_tests)) The English translator has omitted the nominal expressionvom Gesetzgeber

‘by the legislator’. In doing so, she has acted on the (reasonable) assump-tion that the target text reader is able to infer the missing participant (de-noted by “x” in the following formalization) from her world knowledge:

require (x, develop (NHTSA, stability_tests))

The omission of the nominal expressionvom Gesetzgeberevidenced in (41) is an implicitation (and not a genuine omission of information) because the argument/participant verbalized by the expression can be inferred by the target text reader.

You have probably noticed that I have talked about the addition and omission of “nominal expressions” in the preceding paragraphs, although with manufacturers(39) and vom Gesetzgeber(41) are prepositional phrases andthe payment of (40) is not a phrase at all (but part of a phrase). In fact, I have treated cases such as the above as noun-based additions and omis-sions, although the shifts incorporate prepositional material. This was done for two reasons:

First, preposition-based shifts were excluded from analysis for practi-cal reasons (see Section 3.8), and if we ignore the prepositions contained in the above additions/omissions, we are essentially left with nominal ma-terial. Second, while the above shifts do involve prepositions, from a se-mantic perspective they are all about the addition/omission of nominal material. For example, the addition of with manufacturersamounts to the addition of a participant semantically (encoded by the noun manufactur-ers); from a semantic perspective, the prepositionwithis merely stipulated by the head noun cooperation and is of minor semantic importance, i.e. it neither expresses a participant nor a state of affairs. Thus, it was decided to count additions and omissions of prepositional phrases as “noun-based”

shifts. A more correct (but overly verbose) name for these shifts might be

“shifts consisting in the addition/omission of chiefly nominal material”.

The reader is asked to bear this in mind.

What about additions and omissions of adjectives and adverbs? From a formal-semantic perspective, adjectives are closely connected to nouns (cf.

Hamann 1991). When adjectives are used predicatively, they are semanti-cally similar to nouns. Thus, for example,Svenja is German(predicative ad-jective) is semantically equivalent toSvenja is a German(predicative noun).

Both sentences say that the entity Svenja belongs to the set of all Germans.

Due to the central role that predicative adjectives play in the sentence, additions and omissions of predicative adjectives rarely occur in the in-vestigated data. When adjectives are used attributively, i.e. as modifiers of nouns, they constrain the range of objects that their head noun could possibly refer to. For example, the noun phrasefriendly German denotes a subset of all Germans. In this way, attributive adjectives make the refer-ence of nouns more precise. It is easy to see how the referrefer-ence-modifying function of adjectives can be exploited by translators to perform explicita-tion and implicitaexplicita-tion (see Secexplicita-tion 6.2 for examples).

Turning to additions and omissions of adverbs, let us begin by consid-ering an example of an adverbial addition:

(42) We pay billions of dollars in taxes and royalties [. . . ].

Wir zahlenjährlichSteuern und Förderabgaben in Milliardenhöhe [. . . ].

It is quite clear that the semantic function ofjährlich‘annually’ in the Ger-man translation of (42) is to give us more information about the state of affairs in question by telling us when it takes place (viz. every year). We could say that states of affairs do not only incorporate variables for the participants/arguments involved in them, but also ‘special’ variables for providing information about when, how, where, etc. the state of affairs takes place. Thus, we could semantically formalize the English source text of (42) as follows:

pay (we, billions..., T),

where the variable “T” symbolizes the point in time when the state of af-fairs takes place. In the English source text, the reader needs to infer T from their world knowledge. By adding the adverbjährlich, the translator of (42) has relieved the target text reader of inferring the state of affairs’

temporal specification:

pay (we, billions..., every_year)

It is easy to see that the addition of adverbs falls in the first of the two categories mentioned above. By adding an adverb, a translator can further specify a state of affairs expressed by the surrounding discourse.