Explicitation revisited: Shifts in the translation of reporting verbs in the French English-Czech part of the InterCorp parallel corpus
2018
Abstract
The use of reporting verbs in fiction varies considerably from language to language. In English reporting clauses, the neutral he said is preferred to more specific forms such as he grumbled, gasped, cautioned or lied.
In Czech, on the contrary, the repetition of the reporting verb říci/říkat, equivalent of say, is considered as clumsy; subsequently, authors (and translators) try to avoid it, using not only synonyms of say/říci, but also other verbs, explicitating various aspects of the reported speech. The aim of this talk is to carry out not only a thorough quantitative analysis of lexical variation of reporting verbs, but also a detailed qualitative analysis of types of explicitation and of its counterpart, implicitation.