2.5 The Asymmetry Hypothesis
2.6.1 Explicitational asymmetry in translations of report-
Klaudy and Károly (2005) have investigated explicitations and implicita-tions of reporting verbs in literary translaimplicita-tions between English and Hun-garian, expecting (from the Asymmetry Hypothesis) to find a lack of ex-plicitation-implicitation counterbalancing. Their corpus consisted of:
1. The English novel1984by Orwell along with its Hungarian transla-tion
2. Two Hungarian novels (Édes Anna by Kosztolányi and Szent Péter esernyöjeby Mikszáth) along with their English translations
Klaudy and Károly’s analysis “focus[ed] on the investigation of 100 [occur-rences of] reporting verbs and their translations from a randomly selected part of each novel, which adds up to 600 reporting verbs altogether.”
(2005: 19) (Unfortunately, we do not learn how the authors selected the reporting verbs to be analyzed; presumably they selected the first 100 oc-currences of reporting verbs encountered in each randomly chosen novel part.) It should be noted that the results of Klaudy and Károly’s study are somewhat limited in terms of generalizability, since only three authors
and three translators have been investigated. Nevertheless, as will become clear in the following, the results may be taken as a starting point for a number of highly interesting considerations on explicitational asymmetry in translation.
First of all, Klaudy and Károly (2005) note that the two Hungarian nov-els under investigation make use of a much wider variety of reporting verbs than the English novel, hypothesizing that this is due to a general English-Hungarian contrast in communicative norms. Thus, in the extract from Orwell’s1984, the high-frequency verbsayaccounts for 79 of the 100 tokens of reporting verbs under investigation, while the vocabulary of the two Hungarian novel extracts is much more varied, consisting to a much greater degree of rather rare verbs such as megjegyez ‘remark’ or suttog
‘whisper’. This can be seen in the following table (adapted from Klaudy and Károly 2005: 21), which lists the number of verb lemmas (types) for each of the texts investigated by Klaudy and Károly:
source text target text tokens types tokens types
Orwell’s1984 100 14 100 32
Kosztolányi’sÉdes Anna 100 56 100 56
Mikszáth’sSzent Péter esernyöje 100 27 100 24 Table 2.2: Types and tokens of reporting verbs across English and Hungar-ian novels and their translations in both directions
The number of reporting verb verb tokens (verb occurrences) listed in Table 2.2 is the same for all six subcorpora, which is a result of Klaudy and Károly’s research design. The number of reporting verb types (verb lemmas), however, differs considerably across the six subcorpora. Let us walk through the table one step at a time:
1. Comparing the English source text to the Hungarian source texts, we see that the number of types is considerably higher in the Hungarian novel extracts than in the English text, which is due to the fact that the Hungarian authors make use of a much more varied vocabulary (as has been noted above). This is particularly visible in Kosztolányi, who uses as many as 56 different reporting verbs. Mikszáth uses only 27 different reporting verbs, which is still almost double the amount that the English author, Orwell, uses (14 verb types).
2. Comparing the source texts to the target texts, we note an interest-ing difference between the English-Hungarian translation on the one hand and the Hungarian-English translations on the other:
• The Hungarian translation of Orwell’s novel features 32 different verb types, more than double the amount that may be found in the English source text. Since, as we have seen above, 79 of the 100 verb tokens in Orwell’s1984 are instantiations of the verbsay, the trans-lator must have explicitated a great deal, regularly translatingsayby means of more explicit reporting verbs such askérdez‘ask’,megállapít
‘remark’, etc. (Listing the 100 verb tokens found in each subcorpus, Klaudy and Károly show that this is actually the case.) This tendency to explicitate is to be expected from the observation that the Hungar-ian novels exhibit a more varied vocabulary than the English novel:
The Hungarian translator of Orwell’s1984seems to have performed a number of optional explicitations in order to comply with the (as-sumed) communicative preferences of Hungarian readers.
• From the above, we should expect that Hungarian-English transla-tors of literary texts should tend to implicitate, in order to conform to the more implicit communicative conventions of English literary writing (Klaudy and Károly 2005: 24). However, Table 2.2 shows that this is not the case. (This is also shown by Klaudy and Károly’s lists of verb tokens, which are not reproduced here.) The English target texts exhibit approximately as many verb types as their Hungarian source texts, “which means that the rich variety of reporting verbs in the Hungarian original is preserved in the English translation, that is, the translator [. . . ] failed to perform semantic implicitation.” (2005:
24)
Why did the English-Hungarian translator explicitate so much, while the Hungarian-English translators “failed” to perform implicitation? Klaudy and Károly do not provide an answer to this question. I would argue that the present case is very similar to the situation described in the thought experiment offered at the end of Section 2.5.1. The only major difference is that in the scenario described in the thought experiment, coherence (i.e.
understanding) was at stake, while the present case rather concerns es-thetic sensibility.
Why is there no tendency towards implicitation in the Hungarian-English translations? Because translators did not feel the need to im-plicitate. Maybe they even wanted their readers to get a glimpse at the
‘typically Hungarian’ style of writing by preserving the Hungarian source texts’ large repertoire of different reporting verbs. Readers of these transla-tions might be surprised by the variety of reporting words they encounter, including rarities likeyawnorenthuse. Some might even wonder whether the Hungarian language in general is so varied in this respect or if it is
just these particular authors. But in any case, it does not seem much of a problem that the Hungarian-English translators did not implicitate as expected.
In contrast, Hungarian readers of literary translations from English where explicitation has not been performed may find them repetitive or even boring. Being ignorant of the English original, some readers might even accuse the translator of having delivered a bad translation, one that does not tap the full potential of the Hungarian language. This is why the Hungarian translator of Orwell’s1984investigated by Klaudy and Károly might have felt the need to explicitate. Remember that we should expect translators to avoid risk (cf. Section 2.5), and producing a literary transla-tion that might be perceived as boring by Hungarian readers represents a great deal of risk for the translator.
Like the thought experiment offered at the end of Section 2.5.1, the above discussion suggests that explicitation is generally quite a safe bet, while implicitation can be a risky enterprise, regardless of whether coherence/understanding or esthetic sensibility is concerned. Thus, Klaudy and Károly’s statement that translators “oftenfail to perform im-plicitation” (2005: 27; my emphasis) seems to be somewhat unjust. As the above discussion as well as the considerations made in Section 2.5 have shown, explicitation can be considered a legitimate strategy for avoiding risk. Hence, we should think twice before blaming translators for their commonly observed tendency to be more explicit than authors of non-translated texts. However, as Klaudy (2009: 293) argues, implicitation can have important functions. Quoting Nida, she suggests that implicita-tion can be “highly important in the process of adjustment” (Nida 1964:
231). Thus, in translator training it does seem to make sense to educate prospective translators about how and when to perform implicitation.
Klaudy and Károly conclude their paper with some theoretical impli-cations of their study that I would like to cite here in abridged form:
By finding evidence for the asymmetry hypothesis, it may be-come possible to prove that explicitation is indeed a universal feature of translation. [. . . ] If [. . . ] we can identify a special group of cases where explicitation occurs in translation from [any] given source language into [any] given target language without implicitation occurring in the opposite direction, then we have succeeded in identifying a language-pair-independent universal feature of translator behaviour. (Klaudy and Károly 2005: 27)
I find this conclusion highly implausible. Klaudy and Károly themselves suggest that “explicitation and implicitation can beautomatic operationsor conscious strategies” and that “[t]he causes of both explicitation and implic-itation can be language-specific and non-language-specific.” (2005: 15) If explicitation and implicitation were solely automatic operations, it would seem plausible to assume that there is some universal aspect to explici-tational asymmetry. However, if explicitation and implicitation can also be conscious strategies (aimed at bridging cultural gaps, avoiding risk, etc.), which furthermore may be influenced by language-specific factors, it seems highly implausible to assume that there might be “a special group of cases” where explicitational asymmetry is universal.
2.6.2 Obligatory additions vs. optional omissions in trans-lation
My version of the Asymmetry Hypothesis (see Section 2.5) states that obligatory, optional, and pragmatic explicitations tend to be more fre-quent than the corresponding implicitations in the other translation direc-tion. How can obligatory explicitations in one direction be more frequent than the corresponding implicitations in the other direction, if obligatory explicitations are determined by the lexicogrammatical systems of the source and target language? The answer to this question may be found in a highly informative paper by Klaudy (2009). The author observes that in translations between English and Hungarian (as well as in other language pairs) there are certain types of shifts that are obligatory in one translation direction but optional in the other. To exemplify her observa-tion, she cites the following four grammatical categories where additions (explicitations) are obligatory in the direction Hungarian-English, while the corresponding omissions (implicitations) are optional in the direction English-Hungarian:
• Subject
• Object
• Possessive determiner
• Indefinite article
In all four categories, additions are obligatory in the direction English-Hungarian in certain contexts, while in the same contexts the correspond-ing omissions are optional in the opposite direction, Hungarian-English.
As an example, let us consider the case of obligatory Hungarian-English object additions vs. optional English-Hungarian object omissions:
• Translating from Hungarian into English,megkóstoltam‘I tasted PRO’
(where PRO stands for an implicit/inferable object) has to be trans-lated as I tasted it(where the objectit has been added/explicitated) (→explicitation).
• Translating from English into Hungarian,I tasted itmay be translated as megkóstoltam (→ implicitation), but it may also be translated as megkóstoltam azt‘I tasted it’ (→explicitation)
The example illustrates how in the four cases listed by Klaudy explici-tation is obligatory in one translation direction but optional in the other.
This gives rise to the prediction that in the above-mentioned grammat-ical categories, English-Hungarian translators might tend to implicitate less frequently than Hungarian-English translators explicitate – which would lead to explicitational asymmetry. This possibility was explored by Klaudy in a little pilot study, where she compared the number of obliga-tory additions in 100 sentences from the English translation of Mikszáth’s Szent Péter esernyöje to the number of optional omissions in 100 sentences from the Hungarian translation of Orwell’s 1984. The results are listed in Table 2.3.
obligatory additions
Hu→En
optional omissions
En→Hu
unperformed omissions
En→Hu
subject 50 47 7
object 5 7 3
possessive determiner
25 20 2
indefinite article
16 10 16
Table 2.3: Frequency of obligatory additions and optional omissions in 100 sentences of two translated novels (table adapted from Klaudy 2009: 296)
Klaudy comments on this table only very briefly. According to her, the table “show[s] that optional omission is not always practiced by trans-lators.” (2009: 295) I am not sure what this vague remark is intended to tell us, but to me, Table 2.3 looks like evidence against the Asymme-try Hypothesis! While there are less implicitations than explicitations in
possessive determiners and indefinite articles, the table shows that oblig-atory additions of subjects in the direction Hungarian-English are approx-imately counterbalanced by the corresponding omissions in the direction English-Hungarian – which is remarkable given the fact that this kind of omission in optional. That “optional omission is not always practiced by translators” should not surprise us at all, since overt subjects do have cer-tain functions in Hungarian, such as the expression of emphasis or con-trast (cf. e.g. Rounds 2009: 115). In light of this, the rather low numbers of unperformed omissions (listed in the rightmost column of Table 2.3) do not speak in favor of the Asymmetry Hypothesis.
Why are there so many subject omissions (and so few unperformed subject omissions) in the English-Hungarian translation featured in Ta-ble 2.3, unlike the Asymmetry Hypothesis predicts? As we have seen above, overt subjects have certain pragmatic functions in Hungarian, so a Hungarian text where subjects are overused would sound highly awk-ward. The translator of Orwell’s1984investigated by Klaudy was proba-bly well aware of this, which seems to be the reason for the high number of subject omissions observed. The findings of Klaudy’s study thus suggest that factors such as translators’ striving for stylistic/pragmatic adequacy can override translators’ commonly observed tendency to explicitate.28