Bridging cultures through explicitation: a corpus-based analysis of bilingual literary translations

Abstract

This study examines explicitation strategies in translated literary texts to determine their impact on the text’s clarity, style, and cultural representation. Focusing on how these shifts affect the explicitation shifts, the study analyzed two modern Urdu novels, La Hasil and Aks, and their English translations. Using TagAnt and UAM CorpusTool, the study examines approximately 30,000 words of each text to determine the frequency and function of explicitation in the process of constructing the readability and cultural translatability of the target texts. The results show that obligatory explicitation is the most common, further improving coherence and grammatical accuracy while occasionally affecting text-cohesion style. Optional explication, although less typical, enhances stylistic device productivity and, at the same time, restricts the range of interpretation by providing contextual meanings of ambiguous words. However, occasional use of pragmatic explicitation is vital since some relations are culture-bound and, therefore, likely to be unfamiliar to a non-native English readership. Emphasizing the need to balance clarity and fidelity in translation work, it offers insights into translating interlingual literary texts in multinational contexts. Thus, it realizes that translation is an important object of investigation, which corrects and completes the esthetic and cultural density of the source text through explicitation.

Keywords

• Bridging Cultures
• explicitation
• Bilingual translation
• literary translation
• stylistics
• Education