presented in Chapters 4 through 6 as the main value of this book. My analyses show that the phenomenon of explicitation is by far not as mys-terious as previous research has assumed it to be, but rather dependent on a number of concrete lexicogrammatical and pragmatic factors (which will be summarized in Chapter 7).
2. Demonstrate that the policies enacted are the best possible under the circumstances
3. Get across to investors and potential investors the idea that the com-pany’s management deserves investors’ confidence
4. Transmit a positive, attractive corporate image (Garzone 2004: 322; cf. also Hyland 1998)
Only few texts contained in the corpus do not belong to the genre of let-ters to shareholders, but to a closely related genre: mission statements. A mission statement is a short text in which a company describes its “philos-ophy” or “corporate identity” to customers and shareholders. Common titles for texts of this genre are “Our Mission”, “Our Spirit”, or the like.
Mission statements are most commonly found in companies’ annual re-ports and in the “About Us” section of corporate websites. Not surpris-ingly, the main pragmatic function of this genre is to communicate a posi-tive and trustworthy image of the company to its shareholders (Leuthesser and Kohli 1997).
The two genres described above were both included in the project cor-pus (and also in the subset investigated here) without risking inhomo-geneity because they are very similar in terms of their communicative functions. Both genres make use of non-specialist language (Baumgarten and Özçetin 2008: 300) and are highly persuasive in nature, their overar-ching communicative goal being to build up trust among customers and shareholders. The two genres are also comparable in terms of authorship, since letters to shareholders as well as mission statements are typically (but not always) written by the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and/or Chairman of the Executive Board – at least officially (cf. Garzone 2004: 313); it is conceivable that some texts are written in a collaborative effort by several executive board members and/or board-external staff members. In rare cases, the author of the text in question is not stated at all.
The reason why letters to shareholders and mission statements were chosen as data for the present study is a very practical one: Texts belong-ing to these genres are generally translated somewhat ‘literally’, i.e. usbelong-ing a partly overt mode of translation. House (1997) famously distinguishes between two different modes of translation, overt and covert. Simplifying somewhat, overt translations are characterized by an effort of the transla-tor to stay as close to the source text as possible. When translating overtly, the translator does not try to establish an exact match between the com-municative function of the source text in the source language community
and the communicative function of the target text in the target text com-munity. This contrasts with covert translation, where the translator tries to produce a target text that fulfills the same communicative function in the target culture as the source text fulfills (or fulfilled) in the source culture.
In order to achieve this, the translator may apply a “cultural filter” that brings the target text in line with the communicative conventions of the target culture. In this way, the process of covert translation often results in a target text that deviates considerably from the source text. In overt translation, on the other hand, no cultural filter is applied.
The distinction between overt and covert should not be seen as a strict dichotomy. Rather, overt and covert should be seen as the two endpoints of a cline ranging from rather ‘literal’ translations on the one end to rather
‘free’ (non-literal) translations on the other end. The two genres intro-duced above were chosen as data for the present study because they are located somewhere in the middle between overt and covert. This makes them good candidates for an investigation of explicitating and implici-tating shifts in translation. If a target text deviates considerably from its source text, as it is the case in many ‘purely covert’ translations, there will be many passages where sentences or parts of sentences have been omit-ted, added or rearranged, making the identification of shifts difficult or even impossible. The partly overt, partly covert translations investigated here, on the other hand, were comparatively easy to analyze, since the translators have mostly tried to stay somewhat close to the source text, both in terms of semantic content and linguistic realization. This is evi-denced by examples such as the following:
(12) Im Frühjahr 1999 eröffnete XYZ3deshalb eine Plattform für Auktionen unter Privatleuten.
As a consequence, in Spring 1999 XYZ initiated a platform for auctions among private individuals.
(13) Auch der Private-Channel übertrifft mit seinem schnellen Wachstum alle Erwartungen.
The fast growth of the Private-Channel has also exceeded all expectations.
(14) Die Anzahl der Page Impressions stieg auf über eine Million täglich (Stand: September 1999).
3Througout the book, company names occurring in the corpus have been anonymzed as “XYZ”, “ABC”, or the like.
The number of page impressions has risen to over one million a day (status as at September 1999).
The examples represent consecutive sentences taken from the same cor-pus text. It is striking that the English translation does not only mirror the German original semantically, but also mirrors its syntactic surface struc-ture to a considerable degree. Thus, connectives translate connectives (e.g.
deshalb →as a consequence, auch→also), subjects translate subjects, adver-bials translate adveradver-bials (e.g. täglich→a day), etc.4 We get the impression that the translator has made a conscious effort to stay as close to the source text as possible, i.e. to produce an overt translation.
Examples such as the above, where we find few or no semantic devi-ations and only minor syntactic devidevi-ations from the source text, are fre-quent not only in the text from which (12) through (14) originate, but throughout the corpus as a whole (cf. many of the examples discussed in the remainder of this book). For the present study, this means that ex-plicitations and imex-plicitations were comparatively easy to identify.