Reporting That in Translated English. Evidence for Subconscious Processes of Explicitation?

This paper sets out to provide evidence of explicitation in translation into English through an analysis of patterns of inclusion and omission of optional that with the reporting verbs SAY and TELL. The notion of explicitation in the context of translation is first introduced and explained. An overview of the literature relating to that-clauses in English is then given, and this forms the basis for subsequent data analysis. The sources of the data to be analysed are briefly described: the TEC (Translational English Corpus) providing us with translated English, and the BNC (British National Corpus) containing original English. On the basis of a comparison of concordance data from the two corpora, quantitative results serve to illustrate the marked differences in use of that and zero with forms of SAY and TELL. Thus it is shown that the that-connective is far more frequent in TEC than in BNC, and conversely that the zero-connective is more frequent for all forms of both verbs in the BNC corpus than in TEC. A detailed investigation of the instances of occurrence of that/zero constructions in both corpora attempts to categorise, compare and contrast patterns of occurrence, and provides potential starting points for further research of this nature.