Explicitation in translations of prose-fiction from English to Hebrew as a function of norms

The underlying assumption of this article is that explicitation in translation is not, äs previous research has suggested, solely a universal tendency or a function of the position of the languages involved in the act of translation on a literacy/orality scale. It is norm-dependent and thus changes with historical circumstances and according to the Position of translated literature within the target-culture. In the present article, translations of prose-fiction from English to Hebrew published during the 1960s and 1970s serve äs a casestudy for the examination of explicitation from the perspective suggested above. These two decades form a dynamic period in the history of literary translation into Hebrew. The different attitudes to explicitation and the changes that took place in them during these years were marked, and they corresponded to general processes of change in translated literature in Hebrew. I have chosen to focus on translations from English because they occupied a central place in translated literature in those years, äs Israeli culture became more and more involved with Western, and especially American culture. L Exßlicitation in translation Explicitation in translation means turning the implicit (in the source-text) into the explicit (in the translation). This may be performed in various ways: by replacing pronouns with proper nouns; by turning metaphors into similes thereby exposing the act of comparison; and, on the syntactical level, by filling in ellipses and adding conjunctions. The tendency to explicitate is very common in translation. It was recognized in research carried out in the fields of translation, linguistics and communication, for example by Levenston (1985), Blum-Kulka (1986), Zellermayer (1987), Ben-Ari (1988: 65-68). Once recognized, researchers attempted to explain its nature and usage. Multiüngua l1-2 (1992), 153-171 0167-8507/92/0011-0153 $2.00 © Walter de Gruyter, Berlin