Additions of nouns

To begin with, let us look at a type of nominal addition that occurs with approximately equal frequency in both translation directions:

(97) With its Web-based collaboration tools, XYZ Office 2000 is already a powerful component of a knowledge management solution. In the coming year, we will augmentitwith several other key initiatives.

Mit seinen webbasierten Kollaborationstools hat sich XYZ Office 2000 bereits als leistungsstarke Komponente einer

Wissensmanagementlösung etabliert. Im kommenden Jahr werden wirdieses Programmdurch weitere Schlüsselinitiativen noch weiter ausbauen.

(98) One-Stop-Shopping, Supply Chain Management und eBusiness:

Das sind Themen, die in der logistischen Fachwelt seit langem diskutiert werden. XYZ verleihtihnenKonturen, sie werden für Kunden und Investoren real.

One-stop shopping, supply chain management and e-business:

these are all ideas that have been debated by experts in the field for a long time now. XYZ is givingthese conceptsa more concrete shape, helping them become reality for our customers and investors.

In (97), the English source text as well as the German translation contain a pronoun referring to the aforementioned software product XYZ Office 2000, the pronouns in question beingitanddieses. Only the German trans-lation contains an additional noun,Programm‘program’, that further spec-ifies the referent of the pronoun as a (computer) program.⁶ Note that the addition of the nounProgramm was by no means necessary, since a trans-lation ofitby means of the German personal pronouneswould have been possible. But apparently, the translator was worried about target language readers having problems identifying the referent ofes. I assume that this is the reason why the translator has chosen to make referent identification easier by translatingitasdieses Programm‘this program’.

Example (98) is similar. It would have been possible to directly trans-lateihnenasthem, but this could cause a slight processing difficulty, since the English target text offers two possible antecedents for a plural pro-noun likethem: ideasandexperts in the field. (This ambiguity does not arise in the German source text, where the experts in question are referred to by means of the singular nounFachwelt ‘professional world’.) Although ref-erent identification should be unproblematic ultimately, since the English target text sentence only makes sense if the pronoun corefers with ideas, the use ofthemwould represent a potential processing difficulty. This may be the reason why the translator of (98) has preferred to add a specifying noun, renderingihnenasthese concepts.

As it was said above, nominal additions with the (hypothesized) pur-pose of easier referent identification occur independently of the translation direction, i.e. both English-German and German-English translators seem to pursue this strategy. But as we have seen in Table 5.3, there are more than twice as many nominal additions in the direction German-English

6I have treated cases like the present one as nominal additions despite the fact thatitis a personal pronoun whilediesesis a demonstrative pronoun. Note that for grammatical reasons, it is impossible for a translator to add a specifying noun to a personal pronoun without turning it into a demonstrative pronoun.

than in the opposite translation direction. The reason for this is the sys-tematic occurence of a type of nominal addition that exclusively occurs in the direction German-English. The following examples illustrate this specifically German-English type of nominal addition:

(99) Der XYZ Konzern ist auf dem Weltmarkt gut positioniert.Dafür bildet das Produktprogramm das Fundament und sichert die nachhaltige Stärkung unserer Ertragskraft.

The XYZ Group is well positioned on the world market. The foundation stoneof that positionis the product range, which also safeguards the long-term enhancement of our earning power.

(100) Die angestrebte Umsatzsteigerung auf 10 Mrd Euro haben wir erreicht. Dazutrugen sämtliche Konzernbereiche bei.

We achieved our goal of increasing overall sales to EUR 10 billion with all Divisions contributingto this result.

(101) Die Risikovorsorge haben wir mit 2,5 Mrd Euro dotiert. Davon entfielen 0,9 Mrd Euro auf die operative Risikovorsorge [. . . ].

We have allocated EUR 2.5 billion to risk provisions. Of this total, EUR 0.9 billion relates to operational risk provisions [. . . ].

In all three examples, a pronominal adverb in the German source text can be seen as a trigger of a nominal addition in the English translation. In (99), the closest English equivalent of dafür would (in this context) be of that.

Butthe foundation stone of that would sound highly awkward stylistically, so the translator has decided to add the nounposition, an explicitating shift which (somewhat redundantly) emphasizes what the demonstrative pro-noun that refers to. In contrast, the use of dafür in the German original, although semantically equivalent toof that, is not stylistically awkward at all.

Examples (100) and (101) are similar. Here, a non-explicitating transla-tion ofdazuanddavonasto thisandof thiswould be considered as stylisti-cally bad by most Anglophone readers, since the use of a ‘bare’ pronoun is not conventional in this context. This seems to be the reason why in both cases an explicitating noun has been added,resultandtotal.

In this connection, an interesting question comes up. In the examples (86) through (88), which we have discussed in Section 5.1 on pronoun-based shifts, German-English translators were faced with the same situ-ation as the translators of (99) through (101), namely with a pronominal

adverb in the German source text that has no obvious equivalent in En-glish. Why did the translators of (86) through (88) choose to implicitate (by omitting the pronominal adverbs in question), whereas the translators of (99) through (101) preferred to explicitate (by adding nominal material)?

It seems that when judging whether to translate a given pronominal adverb or not, German-English translators seem to be led by the infor-mational value of the item in question, in its respective context. In (88), for example, the informational value of damitseems to be rather low, its meaning being easy to infer from the context. In (101), on the other hand, the meaning ofdavon/of this totalis a lot more difficult to infer, so an im-plicitation here might result in considerable processing difficulties or even misunderstanding.

In general, ‘minimal pairs’ such as (86) through (88) on the one hand versus (99) through (101) on the other hand suggest that when translators encounter a lexicogrammatical item that is difficult to translate, they seem to consider carefully the effect that an omission vs. an addition would have on the reader of the target text, taking into account factors as diverse as the syntactic options offered by the target language and the degree of explicitness demanded by its communicative norms, to name just two ex-amples. This clearly contradicts the assumption that explicitation is due to “subconscious processes” or a “universal strategy” allegedly followed by translators.

Summarizing our findings on cohesive explicitations involving the ad-dition of nouns, we have seen that nouns are added in both translation directions with the hypothesized aim of easier referent identification on the part of the target text reader. Additionally, nouns are added in the di-rection German-English in order to compensate for the lack of pronominal adverbs in English. This second type of nominal addition was found to ac-count for the higher overall number of nominal additions in the direction German-English as compared to the direction English-German. Observa-tion 1is thus explained.