ABSTRACT
Previous research has repeatedly shown that translations in English exhibit a clearer preference for explicit that (vs. a zero marker) in complement clauses compared to non-translated English. The present chapter investigates whether this explicitation tendency in translations can be confirmed in a large dataset of Dutch-to-English translations and which underlying mechanisms guide translators to use that much more often than a zero marker. The results of the analysis show that translators indeed prefer the explicit signal significantly more often than non-translators; via a novel multivariate approach – MuPDAR (Gries & Deshors 2015) – it was found that this preference is related to risk aversion (that is the safest variant to choose, since it is the more frequent option and it clearly demarcates the syntactic structure) and source-language transfer (the absence of Dutch dat in the source sentence led translators to choose the zero marker more often); a clear effect of parallel-language complexity, however, could not be found.
