Dlaczego tłumacz mówi więcej niż autor? O eksplicytacji w przekładzie

The aim of the present paper is to discuss the causes of explicitation. This shift is one of the most frequently researched phenomena in Translation Studies. It has attracted unprecedented interest among translation scholars, giving rise to studies in a variety of language combinations, modes of translation, and text types. Paradoxically, it seems to be the widespread interest explicitation has generated in the Translation Studies community that has led to conceptual inconsistencies and major discrepancies in the perception of this phenomenon, both in terms of its scope and the underlying causes. In the first part of this paper the author delimits the notion of explicitation providing abundant exemplification of both the shifts that should be considered as explicitation proper and the shifts that – despite their capacity to make translated texts more explicit – are not cases of explicitation. In the subsequent part the author discusses different approaches to explicitation in which this translational shift is attributed to a variety of causes: the translator’s cognitive processes, metaphorical mapping, risk aversion, striving for optimal relevance of the message, and translational norms. At a different level the type and extent of explicitation also depend on idiosyncratic preferences of translators and source-text features. The author concludes that the long-standing dispute in the Translation Studies community concerning the cause of explicitation is to a large extent unfounded as even within a single text explicitation might stem from a mixture of the above-mentioned reasons.