Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

4 Introduction
in the possible existence of such laws, but in their explanatory power, which, at
least for the time being, shows great promise. Toury prefers the term ‘laws’
to ‘universals’, but concedes to talk about universals in the present context,
without too much concern.
Andrew Chesterman continues the thread of thought stemming from the
quest for generalities which characterises all science. He considers the different
ways in which translation studies have sought the general, distinguishing what
he calls the prescriptive route, the pejorative route, and the descriptive route.
The contributions and problems of each are discussed, with the main focus
on the currently prevailing descriptive study of translation, where further
distinctions are made, such as the very useful one between universals which
relate to the process from the source to the target text (what he calls S-
universals), and those which compare translations to other target language
texts (T-universals). He raises many other fundamental questions, relating to
the nature of evidence, the concept of tendency, and the problem of testing
very high-level hypotheses, questioning for each the current conceptualisation
and terminology, which, not surprisingly, tend to vary widely and often suffer
from vagueness. Finally, Chesterman invites us to go beyond descriptions,
to explanations, and consider questions of causes as well as effects. He calls
for wider testing of hypotheses, standardisation and operationalisation of
concepts, and generation of new hypotheses.
The final paper in this section, by Silvia Bernardini and Federico Zanettin,
assesses the appropriateness of corpus-based approaches to the search for universals.
Terminologically, they share Toury’s preference for ‘law’ over ‘universal’,
although for different reasons (its better fit into the framework of Firthian
linguistics). They address the issue of corpus design in view of the claims that
have been made for their ability to offer a testbed for translational hypotheses
at the highest levels of generalisation. The discussion is filtered through
an illustrative case, the compilation of an English-Italian translational corpus,
which is of the parallel corpus type, and bidirectional. The organising concept
is Toury’s “preliminary norms”, that is, the translation policies which largely
determine things like the selection of texts for translation. A survey of texts
that are available in translation quickly reveals that a considerable asymmetry
prevails between languages as regards the proportions of genres. Sheer overall
numbers show that for a given language pair, more gets translated in one direction
than the other. In addition, translations in one direction are likely to be
differently biased for prestige, date of original, and other social determinants.
The dilemma that follows is that comparability of the texts conflicts with the
objective of reflecting the prevailing preliminary norms, although an ambi-