Deletion and abbreviation are generally more difficult to justify than expansion and addition. A trivial reason for this is that quantity is commonly the basis for determining the actual price of translations. Whatever the value of their work, translators tend to be paid so much per word or page (other parts of localization are controlled more by time than by textual quantity). In such circumstances, any translator who seeks to improve a text by shortening it is going to lose money. This part of the profession mostly fails to appreciate the kind of work that results in the reduction of quantities.

There are other reasons as well. Just as no one likes to be excluded from a secret, the more one feels excluded from the implied second person of a text, the more value one tends to attribute to that text. One of the fundamentals of simultaneous interpreting is that, no matter how lost you are, you try not to leave prolonged silences in the outgoing translation. As long as the receivers are getting a fairly continuous non-contradictory text, they will tend not to know

what they are missing. If, on the other hand, the receivers are confronted by substantial gaps in the interpreting, they will begin to doubt the value of the rendition as a whole. Overt deletion is likely to promote mistrust.

The same is true of written dots, be they across the page, between brackets, or editing a quotation. Surgery scars talk about the surviving body: something must be missing. And the marks themselves indicate that what is missing is semantic content, of some unknowable kind.

Technically, deletion involves cases where semantic content is actually omitted, whereas abbreviation would mean the content is expressed in a reduced textual quantity. If we decide to leave out two chapters of this book, that would be deletion. But if we judge the book on the basis of the publicity blurb and the table of contents, that would be using abbreviation. Our distinction, however, need not refer to any illusion of stable or passive semantic content. It is enough that deletion be marked as such, in the silences of the interpreter, the three dots between square brackets, or the chapter numbers that mysteriously jump from 5 to 8. The receiver will know something has been left out. Abbreviation, on the other hand, must use all the tricks of apparent continuity in order to create the essentialist illusion that content somehow remains the same when you reduce its space. The interpreter's flow must be as continuous as possible, the paraphrase does not declare its status as a possible translation, and markers of cohesion must be in order.

As reduction of waste, abbreviation is not as difficult to justify as outright deletion is. In a world of deadlines, localization feeds on abbreviation. Translators are increasingly called upon to write summaries and reports, compressing source materials in accordance with the interests of very specific locales. The inevitable restriction of the locale means that abbreviation often resembles deletion in that it leads to second-person exclusion: the more condensed a text,

the fewer people will be able to work with it. Just check the sigla and acronyms now used in any technical field that is not your own.

We have noted Zipf's law that the most frequent terms tend to be the shortest (1965). Frequency of use might thus explain and justify abbreviation. However, the message of locales is that use is not spread across a whole language; the frequencies accumulate in highly segmented domains. Frequently restricted use tends to justify esoteric secrets, of dubious social virtue. In localization, which presupposes distribution away from the centers of maximum frequency, abbreviation must inevitably seek its legitimacy in terms of a suitably informed locale. However, most locales have to be informed first. A commonsense recommendation would be to give full and translated versions of all sigla and acronyms at least twice in each text, usually upon first mention and in a glossary.

责任编辑：admin