Informational density: a problem for translation and translation theory 1 CATHRINE FABRICIUS-HANSEN Abstract The present paper is concerned with theoretical and practical aspects of paraphrasing or translating (German) texts showing a relatively high degree of syntactic complexity and informational density into (Norwegian) texts characterized by a less complex, more paratactical style, and vice versa. The theoretical setting is (segmented) discourse representional theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993; Asher 1993), which allows a whole family of informationally equivalent texts to be represented by one discourse repre- sentation structure and thus opens the way for a theoretical explication of the notion of (relative) informational density. It is shown that paraphrasing/translating a "hypotactical" into a "paratactical" text is governed by two principles — information splitting and discourse structure fidelity — that are, to a certain degree, in conflict with each other. The more information splitting is done, the more difficult it will be to reconstruct the segmented discourse representational structure (SDKS) of the original text, that is, the overall discourse/text structure in the more traditional sense. Translation from "paratactical" into "hypotactical" texts calls for information collecting instead of information splitting; the main difficulty lies in assigning a SDKS to the text and determining which part of the information given in the text should be syntactically downgraded, and how that should be done. Introduction Viewed from a foreign language like Norwegian, written varieties of modern German often seem rather heavy, loaded with information, difficult to read, and difficult to translate adequately into the mother tongue. In particular, this holds of academic and various other kinds of expository prose, which — so it seems — tend to show a much higher Linguistics 34 (1996), 521-565 0024-3949/96/0034-0521 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of Oslo in Norwa Authenticated | 129.240.0.83 Download Date | 11/30/13 4:52 PM