Informativeness and explicit linking in the translation of the English V-ing free adjuncts into Catalan

This paper reports on a study designed to assess the influence of the pragmatic Principle of Informativeness on the translatorial strategy of explicitation. It replicates a previous study on the occurrence of conjunctional augmentation of English present participle free adjuncts in a monolingual corpus (Kortmann 1991), with a database of translation instances from English into Catalan. The study aims at testing the validity of Kortmann’s scale of informativeness of semantic / discourse relations (e.g. Condition, Cause, Simultaneity, etc.) as a (partial) account of explicitation by means of sentence and discourse connectives. The methodology is text-based and involves collecting a database of pairs of sequences (English source text, Catalan translation), identifying the most plausible interpretation between free adjunct and matrix clause, and classifying them into instances that have undergone explicitation vs. non-explicitation. The data are analysed quantitatively (by finding the percentages of explicitation per relationship) as well as qualitatively (by analysing the kinds of semantic shifts that occur between source texts and translations).