Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

118 Jarmo Harri Jantunen
translations from one source language only compared with translations in
general. An example of this is the case of hyvin. However,thesituationisfar
more complicated, as we saw in the analyses of kovin and oikein. Contraryto
hyvin, the degree modifiers kovin and especially oikein show less varied lexical
patterning across the language variants. It looks that there is a continuum
from less stable lexical collocations of hyvin to fixed collocations of oikein.
This indicates that even very synonymous words may have different degrees of
collocational variance. According to the Three-Phase Comparative Analysis of
lexical associations, it is obvious that the collocational variance across language
variants may be affected not only by (1) the language variant itself but also by
(2) the actual words in a language, no matter how closely they are semantically
or syntactically related to each other.
6. Further analysis: grammatical associations of hyvin
Here I will focus only on one degree modifier, namely hyvin, whichaswesaw
above exhibits the most varied lexical combinations across language variants.
The aim of the following analysis is to complement the picture of variation by
focusing on grammatical associations. In this case, I will focus not only on the
1R position but on the whole span from position 2L to position 2R (see Figure
2 above). The analysis is carried out by counting each of the word classes in a
given position and then by calculating the proportion of each word classes.
I will start the analysis from the position 1R, which was already analysed
above from the standpoint of collocations. The syntactic categories, that is
to say, the colligates, which occur in position 1R are adjectives, adverbs and
quantifiers as well as prepositional or postpositional phrases. The variance of
wordclassesinthispositionissmallerthaninotherpositions.Thisisduetothe
limited variety of the headwords that degree modifiers are able to premodify;
in other positions there is more variety.
The first part of the TPCA of colligations (Figure 3 below) shows, to begin
with, that hyvin clearly prefers adjectives in this position: their proportion
is 66–75% of all colligates. The proportion of adverbs is obviously less (21–
27%), and the proportions of quantifiers and adposition structures are very
minor. Comparison of the distributions across subcorpora shows, first of all,
that translations in general are very similar to non-translation: the proportions
of each colligate are almost equal in this position. However, translations
from English show a clearly different tendency: firstly, they differ from nontranslations,
which indicates an impact of the source language. 14 Hence, the