Shifts in translating Jeremy Munday into Arabic: Asymmetric explicitation

This paper examines explicitation in my translation of Jeremy Munday's Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications into Arabic. Explicitation can be triggered by a TL-oriented strategy that demands a translation to sound lucid, cohesive, coherent and original in its own right. One problem facing many Arab translators negotiating meaning between English and Arabic is how to undo the constraints imposed by the ST textual patterns and whether to decode embedded messages and encode them explicitly in the TT. Unlike English whose modes of expression are generally characterized by overriding variation in terms of cross-referencing, synonymy, ellipsis, etc., Arabic allows more tolerant modes with repetition being a prominent feature. One way of rendering the ST is replacing patterns of variation with patterns of explicitating repetition in the TT. The asymmetric explicitation hypothesis (Klaudy 2003) is interestingly applicable to the Arabic translating situation where the translator has two options, i.e. either to perform asymmetric explicitation or maintain ST implicitation in a translation. It is hypothesised that the Arabic TT will show a higher level of explicitness so as to cement textual cohesion, establish coherence and explicate meaning. Randomly selected examples will be discussed to test the validity of this hypothesis.