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Introduction 3
the main methodological principles in an ambitious domain like this is to keep
in mind the diversity of languages, and not draw excessively hasty conclusions
on the basis of comparing typologically very close languages only, or a very
small range of languages.
The present volume is a selection of articles from an international conference
with the same topic as the book, “Translation Universals – Do They Exist?”
held in Savonlinna, October 2001, on questions relating to translation universals.
Despite the uniform focus on the topic, it comprises a number of different
approaches from theoretical discussion of the issues to empirical studies testing
some of the main hypotheses put forth so far. The research field is still
very new, as empirical work only seriously began in the late nineties. Several
papers discuss the established hypotheses on universals in the light of recent
work in different languages, and some move on to test new hypotheses that
have emerged out of the research carried out in the last two or three years.
One of the central issues is the role of interference in relation to translation
universals, and a number of suggestions are made as to its position, based on
various empirical approaches. Most studies report work based on large translational
corpora, which have begun to appear in many languages now, with
applications to translator education also included. The papers cover a number
of source and target languages, which makes a welcome change in the heavily
English-dominated field.
The volume is divided into four main sections, according to the main foci
of the papers. Those in the first section, Conceptualising Universals, address
issues concerning the notion of universals and universality, and the extent to
which this is appropriate or fruitful as an avenue for translation studies to take.
The first two articles, by Gideon Toury and Andrew Chesterman, discuss the
concept of universals, reflecting upon the possibility, and indeed desirability,
of discovering them in translations. Both stress the demanding nature of the
enterprise, and the methodological difficulties involved. Nevertheless, both
also see the search for universals as an important step forward for translation
studies, particularly as regards the character and credibility of translation
studies as a ‘science’. Moreover, both welcome corpus-based work as a major
road towards progress in the field, while neither is actively personally involved
in corpus-based studies. Gideon Toury’s opening article discusses the roles of
different levels of abstraction in discovering regularity, and posits probabilistic
statements at the highest level of generality. He then raises the question whether
probabilistic propositions, or conditioned regularities, are the best we can hope
for in descriptive translation studies, and if this is so, are these the universals we
have been looking for. The value of the concept of universals for Toury lies not