Ever since the introduction of Translation Universals, their existence has been widely debated. Explicitation and implicitation are no exception to this. These Translation Universals, both...Show moreEver since the introduction of Translation Universals, their existence has been widely debated. Explicitation and implicitation are no exception to this. These Translation Universals, both separately and together, have been studied in a variety of genres and text types. This thesis examined explicitation and implicitation in Dutch Patient Information Leaflets (PILs). It looked at how explicit the Dutch PILs were, what the rate of explicitation to implicitation was, and which explicitation and implicitation strategies were used. To study this, a bilingual parallel corpus of English and Dutch PILs of orally taken contraceptives was analysed. The source and target texts were compared side by side and occurrences of explicitation and implicitation were identified, the rate of explicitation to implicitation was calculated and the different implicitation strategies used were determined. The results show a rate of 60% explicitation and 40% implicitation, with 234 explicitation shifts and 156 implicitation shifts identified. Additionally, a wide range of explicitation and implicitation strategies was found, with the most common explicitation strategies being the addition of a connective element, the filling of an elliptical structure and the use of lexical repetition. The most commonly used implicitation strategy, by far, was the use of a hypernym. Overall, Dutch PILs were more explicit than English ones, especially concerning connectives, though English PILs were more explicit in regard to hyponyms. With this research into explicitation and implicitation, we are one step closer to either confirming or disputing these Translation Universals, using the method proposed by Chesterman (2010). Additionally, by researching the explicitness of PILs, we contribute to the existing research on their lay-friendliness.Show less
The phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the...Show moreThe phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the literature, unlike the other, more famous, cases of semantic agreement, e.g. hybrid nouns (Corbett 2015), pancake sentences (Enger 2004). This thesis is dedicated to investigating honorific agreement in Russian on the basis of independently collected data from the Russian National Corpus and a number of individually selected literary works.Show less
