Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

114 Jarmo Harri Jantunen
items compared to translations in general since the value of the x 2 test (4.92) is
under the critical value. Consequently, we can refine the earlier hypothesis and
formulate a new hypothesis (concerning lexical frequencies) based on both statistical
tests and Three-Phase Comparative Analysis: Translated language tends
to exhibit untypical frequencies of lexical items, but this tendency may be sourcelanguage
dependent. From the hypothesis it follows that untypical frequencies
of lexical items are not considered to be a universal tendency in translations,
rather a phenomenon that may well be influenced by a source language factor.
This may seem surprising compared with the figures represented in Table
2 and particularly in the light of Mauranen’s earlier findings. Both Table 2 and
Mauranen (2000) rest on relative frequencies, which, in fact, show a very similar
tendency, but which cannot be used alone to study and reliably test the
similarities and dissimilarities of different language variants.
In the next sections, the focus will be on findings that concern lexical
and grammatical associations of the degree modifiers. The presentation of the
outcomes is divided into two main sections: firstly, the results that concern
lexical combinations of all the three modifiers, and secondly, the results related
to the grammatical combinations of one particular degree modifier, namely,
hyvin.
5. Lexical associations of synonymous modifiers hyvin, kovin and oikein
In the following section, the analysis of lexical associations will be limited
to immediate right collocates, that is, the position 1R in concordance lines.
These collocates function as syntactic headwords of the degree modifiers.
Consequently, the collocates are likely to include adjectives (hyvin väsynyt
‘very tired’), adverbs (oikein hyvin, ‘very well’), quantifiers (kovin paljon ‘very
much’) and prepositions (hyvin lähellä kotiani ‘very near my home’). The
distribution of the word classes of significant collocates is shown in Table 3.
First of all, the total number of significant collocates is clearly smaller
in CNF than in the translational subcorpora. This must be partly due to
the smaller number of modifiers in CNF, as displayed previously in Table
2. If the number of degree modifiers in a corpus increased, the number of
different (significant) collocates would most likely also increase. Secondly,
for every modifier, the proportion of each word class is broadly the same
in every language variant. For example, the number of adjectives is almost
equal to the number of adverbs. However, in one case there is a strikingly
difference: the number and proportion of adjectival collocates of hyvin are