Audience Design in Fiction Translation: A Systemic Functional Analysis of Explicitation and Implicitation Shifts in Denys-Johnson Davies’ Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World and Ronak Husni and Daniel Newman’s Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader

Abstract

This thesis attempts to incorporate the "variationist sociolinguistic" concept of audience design (Bell, 1984, 1997, 2001) into translation studies, especially fiction translation in order to propose that audience design is one of the main factors that cause a shift in the translator's style. Shifts in translator's style are investigated in terms of explicitation and implicitation shifts in two collections of short stories. The first is a bilingual reader (2008) directed to a specific group of target audience acknowledged by the translators in their introduction, while the other (2000) is directed to a broader audience. Most of the studies that have attempted analyses of explicitation and implicitation shifts have focused only on quantitative and qualitative classifications of explicitation and implicitation shifts, without delving deeper into the translator's mind to uncover the causes of such shifts. Therefore, the main contribution of this thesis is the attempt to link explicitation and implicitation shifts to audience design. The methodology of analysis leans on Hallidayan metafunctional analysis (Halliday 1978; Halliday & Matthiessen 1999, 2004) and complements this analytical framework with Klaudy's (1998, 2008) pragmatic explicition to incorporate both pragmatic and lexicogrammatical aspects. The conclusion reveals a heightened use of explicitation shifts over implicitation shifts in both corpora. Additionally, text type, the translator's purpose and audience design considerations are all deemed important factors to account for stylistic variations in translation.