The translation of null subjects: a test case for the explicitation hypothesis?

Abstract

This article examines the translation of Finnish null subjects into German. The focus is on the Finnish passive, which is a syntactic construction without a subject. Because clauses without subjects are ungrammatical in the target language under scrutiny, the translator has to add a subject. How this is done and whether the addition of the subject involves explicitation are the main research questions in this study whose empirical corpus consists of eight contemporary Finnish books and their German translations. The most important result of the ST-TT comparison is that the obligatory expression of a missing category does not necessarily involve explicitation. In the German translations, the question of which participant is encoded as the subject is not dictated automatically by cross-linguistic differences. It involves interpretation, decision making and creativity from the translator. The German subjects are not uniform, and with regard to the explicitation hypothesis this means that the source-target relationships are not uniform either. Only some German translation equivalents may be regarded as belonging to the sphere of explicitation, while others remain outside of its scope. In other words, the relation of the target language counterpart to the missing source language category may vary. This conclusion may have a bearing for future studies on the obligatory explicitation in other language pairs.