Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

96 Sari Eskola
4. Discussion
The results show that translating does have an influence on the frequencies
and distributions of Finnish non-finite verb forms. They suggest further that
this influence has its source in the source language. Similar tendencies have
been shown clearly also by two other Finnish researchers using corpus-based
methods. Mauranen (2000) analysed word combinations – both collocations
and multi-word strings – in Finnish translations and found that highly targetlanguage-specific
items tend to be under-represented in translations. Drawing
on Reiss (1971), Tirkkonen-Condit (2000) studied some modal verbs that she
calls unique, untranslatable items in Finnish (e.g. jaksaa, malttaa, viitsiä, kehdata),
and found that they are used less in translations as compared to spontaneously
produced texts. These are both lexical studies and now my results
have shown that this kind of behaviour also holds for some syntactic structures.
The linguistic choice between alternative, interchangeable expressions
tends to produce different solutions in spontaneous writing and translating.
This can be seen as evidence of the law of simplification: translators simplify
by not using the resources of the target language according to its systemic possibilities
as widely as the authors of original texts, but rather tend to keep close to
the make-up of the source text and “forget” the alternatives available. In other
words there are choices, but the variance in the way they are taken advantage
of is smaller in translations than in original texts.
My main conclusion can thus be formulated as follows:
Translations tend to under-represent target-language-specific, unique linguistic
features and over-represent features that have straightforward translation
equivalents which are frequently used in the source language (functioning as
some kind of stimuli in the source text).
This means that the existence of a source-language stimulus raises the likelihood
of using a corresponding construction in translation, and its absence
reduces it. The hypothesis concerning the source-language stimulus is close
to the idea of interference, which is of course not new. The notion of interference
implies that translation reflects source-language features in a negative
way. However, there are two basic differences between the “old” and the “new”
way of looking at interference. First, statements about it have so far been made
almost exclusively on the basis of the SL-TL relationship: what is new in the
kind of research carried on by descriptive corpus-based translation studies is
that evidence of interference can be seen on the grounds of target-language
data only. Second, in the light of recent results it is important to see the impact