Explicitness and Implicitness of Binary Coherence Relations

Translations differ from native texts – this is a widely accepted fact. Nowadays the investigation focuses on the question how they differ examining the style of translation, more precisely translation universals – features inherent to translation independent of the language involved. This work is a response to Christopher Hopkinson''s hypothesis based on a functional, meaning-based typology of explicitness shifts. Hopkinson studied binary coherence relations, which he divided into static and dynamic. His conclusion was that dynamic relations ‘attract’ a relatively higher degree of explicitation. The current work is an attempt to redefine the static and dynamic relations introduced by Hopkinson and to apply this revised typology on a corpus of newspaper texts. Hopkinson also observed that the target texts tend to be more explicitly dynamic. A comparable corpus was thus used in order to explore target and original texts in terms of their internal coherence based on dynamic or static relations. The work is a reaction to a hypothesis introduced by another scholar and as such hopes to contribute to the present discussion on the nature of translation universals.