Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

94 Sari Eskola
Different tendencies in texts translated from English and Russian may be
influenced by actual frequencies of these theoretically possible constructions
in these source languages. My own hunch is that past-tense gerunds are really
common in the Russian language and more common than in English. The
problem is the lack of evidence of real typicality of these verb forms in these
two languages. As I already stated earlier, our intuition as to what is possible in
a language is much more reliable than our intuition as to what is typical in it
(see also Sinclair 1991:39; Mauranen 2000:138), and in this respect empirical
results about the actual use of these structures in English and Russian are
needed before any final statements can be made.
There is one interesting marked difference in the use of temporal constructions
that concerns word order. In Finnish quite a free choice is available
with respect to the position of the qualifiers of the temporal construction (although
there are certain restrictions not specified here). For example in autoa
pestessään (word for word translation: ‘the car washing POSS.SUFF.’) the qualifier
is in front position and in pestessään autoa (word for word translation:
‘washing POSS. SUFF. the car’) it is in back position. As Table 4 indicates, in
original Finnish texts qualifiers tend to be in front position more often than in
translations. It is a well-known fact that in Russian gerund-structures and in
English ing-participles, qualifiers are almost always (object without exception)
in back position. This might influence the word order in translations.
Table 4. Position of qualifiers in temporal constructions with a possessive suffix
Front position
Back position
f % f %
TE-texts N = 1112 285 25.6 827 74.4
TR-texts N = 1297 298 23.0 999 77.0
OF-texts N = 580 319 55.0 261 45.0
3.2.3 The final construction
The final construction is used to express the idea of aim or purpose. On the
whole it is used in Finnish much less than referative and temporal constructions.
Unlike the referative construction it has a clear straightforward equivalent
in both Russian and English. The difference between these languages is
that Finnish allows a choice between non-finite and finite forms and Russian
and English most typically use non-finite forms (7).