ABSTRACT
Since Blum-Kulka’s Explicitation Hypothesis (1986), a relatively larger degree of explicitation is generally considered as one of the several characteristics in which translations differ from non-translated texts. However, there is no consensus about the causes of that increased explicitness. Following Kruger (2018) and Kruger & De Sutter (2018), this chapter wants to contribute to the discussion about the possible roles played by risk-aversion, processing-strain, and source-language transfer, three often-mentioned causes of explicitation, by investigating a specific case of grammatical variation (i.e. the Dutch om/zero-alternation in infinitival clauses). The selected case is special in that the most common variant is not the most explicit one. An application of the MuPDAR approach (Gries & Deshors 2014) to data from the Dutch Parallel Corpus suggests that the choice between om and a zero complementizer is largely determined by a relatively small number of factors, viz. the head of the infinitival clause, the presence or absence of coordination, and register. Our analysis also shows (i) that the explicit variant occurs relatively more often in translated than in original Dutch, and (ii) that this difference is related to complexity-related factors. It will be argued that these results point in the direction of the risk-aversion hypothesis: translators show an overall greater preference for the explicit construction, i.e. the variant which explicitly marks the syntactic structure of the sentence, most prominently so in contexts of relatively low complexity, possibly so as to reduce the risk of misunderstanding. Furthermore, the analysis of the translated data shows that in the case of the om-alternation, source-language interference potentially contributes to the increased explicitness in translated Dutch, too.
