An exploratory study of explicitation evident in voice-over translation in Japan's globally aired English-language TV news

The Japanese publlc broadcaster's global English-language TV service uses practices that can be seen as "pragmatic explicitation" (Klaudy, 2011, pp. 106-107) or "information addition" (Hasegawa, 2012, p. 179) in its creation of scripts for its main news show in order to help non-Japanese viewers who are unfamiliar with Japan to understand news that emanates from Japan (NHK World, 2015, pp. 60-61). Many of the news stories contain voice-over where the source language is Japanese. In light of (a) the aforementioned practices and (b) literature suggesting that voice-over translation should give an "almost word for word" rendering (Franco, Matamala, and Orero, 2013, p. 26), the authors investigated the extents of "pragmatic explicitation" (Klaudy, 2011, pp. 106-107), i.e., "information addition" (Hasegawa, 2012, p. 179), "obligatory explicitation" (KlaldY, 2011, p. 106), and "optional explicitation" (Klaudy, 2011, p. 106) in the show's voice-over translation and the extent to which such phenomena may cause the voice-over audio to diverge from being "a faithful, literal, authentic and complete version of the original audio" (Franco, Matamala, & Orero, 2013, p. 26). Based on their findings, they propose a Japanese-to-English news voice-over translation strategy that involves trying to limit explicitation to "obligatory explicitation" (Klaudy, 2011, p. 106).