‘Lösen Sie Schachtelsätze möglichst auf’: The Impact of Editorial Guidelines on Sentence Splitting in German Business Article Translations

Abstract

Sentence splitting is assumed to occur mainly in translations from languages that prefer a hierarchical discourse structure, such as German, to languages that prefer an incremental structure. This article challenges that assumption by presenting findings from a diachronic corpus study of English–German business article translations, which shows that sentence splitting has long been common in German business translation, and perhaps because of editorial guidelines, has increased strongly over the course of the 25 years under analysis. A corpus of unedited draft versions and published versions of the same translations is used to show that sentence splitting is also affected by editors where translators did not split the sentence. The evidence suggests that sentence splitting may be a strategy of explicitation in translation rather than a phenomenon triggered mainly in translation into languages with incremental discourse structures. The observed increase in sentence splitting in German may indicate a shift by which meaning relations are increasingly made between sentences using cohesive resources of reference rather than within sentences using grammatical devices such as hypotaxis or parataxis.