translation, descriptive translation studies, universals, explicitation, implicitation, equivalence, context

This monograph reports on an empirical study of explicitation and implicitation in translations of essayistic texts from Czech into English, using a parallel corpus of 80,000 words. A comprehensive, semantically-based typology of translational explicitness shifts is proposed. The analysis examines the influence of semantic factors on the frequency and occurrence of explicitation or implicitation in order to determine which meaning types are most prone to explicitness shifts in each direction. The distribution of explicitations and implicitations is then analyzed to determine the extent to which they occur universally across the entire corpus, and the effects of the shifts are analyzed in order to characterize the key differences between the properties of source texts and target texts arising from the accumulation of explicitness shifts through the text.