Stylistic redundancy in research papers

Padding as interlingual pleonasm in translation

Abstract

We conducted research to identify structures that might be problematic in translation due to their being considered redundant if they were translated. These structures were studied in 30 randomly collected papers by Slovak scholars in the humanities field. The research aims to define the notion of stylistic redundancy in academic English, propose its notional paradigm and in doing so argue for its inclusion in translation issues. Based on the findings, we suggest that padding be conceptualized as interlingual pleonasm resulting from lexical, grammatical (syntactic), or stylistic (discourse) asymmetry in a language pair, manifested as dysfunctional redundancy in the target language and unveiled through semantic translation. The notional paradigm of padding includes the following types: hypercharacterization (due to reiteration of meaning), hypercharacterization (due to semantic emptiness), tautology, hypercorrection, pleonastic stringy phrases, pleonastic phrasemes, pleonastic clauses, and pleonastic sentences (sentence complex). The possible effects that these structures may exert are as follows: redundant modification in naming, semantically empty modification, usage of quasi-binomials, terminological over-saturation, over-aggregation of nominal phrases, inadequate implementation of author’s voice, syntactic over-complexity, and redundant exposition of information meant to be implicit and default.