Redefining Expansion, A Critical Look

This Professional Studies program is offered for 0.4 PS CEUs at the little/none Content Knowledge Level. RID HQ is an approved RID CMP Sponsor for continuing education activities.

The meanings of words do not inherently reside within the words themselves, nor do they exist as pre-formed structures in the mind (Langacker, 2008). Instead, meaning is dynamically constructed during communication, created and interpreted as we engage in utterances. This presents particular challenges for interpreters and translators, who must render meaning between different languages. A key issue, which will be the focus of this workshop, is managing utterances with minimal forms and translating the corresponding conceptualization into another language—commonly referred to as "expanding the message."

The concept of Expansion, introduced by Lawrence (1995), has been widely adopted in sign language interpreting. However, the precise nature of what is being expanded remains unclear. Is it the linguistic forms, the semantic content, or the underlying conceptual structures? Furthermore, what Lawrence identifies as “expansion features” may be better understood as discourse features, given that monolingual users of ASL are not expanding their messages but rather employing the natural linguistic resources of their language. Lawrence herself notes that while ASL and English differ in form, they offer equivalent messages, with ASL utilizing spatial and visual features suited to its modality. Yet, the rationale for labeling these discourse features as “expansion” remains unresolved.

In Translation Studies, the term Explicitation refers to a translation technique in which the target text becomes more explicit than the source, often making implicit information more overt (Englund Dimitrova, 2005). However, the challenge lies in identifying what qualifies as implicit (Murtisari, 2016). Researchers typically look for forms in the target text that are not present in the source, but this approach often focuses more on surface-level changes than on underlying meaning. This form-centric focus in both translation and interpreting has led to the tendency to equate expansion with the mere addition of linguistic material, rather than considering changes in conceptualization. This emphasis on form, counting the number of “countable forms” added during translation, has shaped traditional accounts of expansion and explicitation.

This workshop will explore a more meaning-centered approach to managing situations where the source language does not explicitly state something yet still conveys a concept. The goal is to equip participants with tools to discern which aspects of the conceptual world can be carried into the target language and to evaluate whether this constitutes "expansion." Additionally, we will discuss how explicitation has become normalized as a near-universal strategy in both interpreting and translation.

Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this workshop will argue for a meaning-based understanding of expansion, which focuses on the content and construal of concepts evoked by language (Langacker, 2008; Halverson, 2007). By considering how conceptual meaning is construed differently in source and target languages, participants will gain a better understanding of shifts in meaning that do not necessarily expand the message but instead offer a different construal of the original meaning.