L'implicite dans la traduction du discours technique et scientifique

Drawing on the explicitation hypothesis put forward by Blum-Kulka (1986) and taken up by corpus studies (Baker 1995 and Laviosa 1997), the paper will argue that the issue of implicitness/explicitness, normally associated with literary translation, features also in the translation of scientific and technical discourse and can be examined in the light of the concept of «shifts.» Shifts in implicitness can be due to systemic constraints (for instance the treatment of compounds in translation from English into French), stylistic constraints (the need to avoid repetition) as much as to translational factors. On the basis of examples drawn from the French translations published in La Recherche of scientific English articles, it will be argued that the above constraints will lead to instances of implicitation as well as explicitation in the translation process.