Explicitation and Implicitation in Arabic- English Translation of Institutional Academic Correspondence

Abstract

Within the context of university communication, the choice of translation strategies can significantly impact the clarity and effectiveness of academic correspondence. This study investigates the role of explicitation and implicitation in translating from English (source language) to Arabic (target language). We explore how these strategies manifest in institutional academic correspondence (circulars and memos) and determine which strategy is more prevalent. Skopos Theory serves as the theoretical framework for this research. The study analyzed a corpus of 196 academic documents issued by the University of Sharjah between 2014 and 2020. An extended version of Klaudy's (2009) classification model was employed to identify instances of explicitation and implicitation across various linguistic levels (syntactic, semantic, stylistic, textual, and pragmatic). Our findings reveal a preference for implicitation in the English source texts compared to the Arabic translations. Furthermore, the analysis identified diverse manifestations of both strategies across different linguistic levels. The study concludes that explicitation and implicitation are both utilized in academic correspondence translation, but with varying frequencies.