Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

6 Introduction
which, on the face of it, could be assumed to be typical of translations in that
they offer convenient ways of overcoming syntactic differences in the source
and target languages. Her findings indicate that translations, compared with
original TL texts, overrepresented those SL features which had straightforward
translation equivalents in the TL, but, conversely, underrepresented features
which were specific to the TL. This supports Tirkkonen-Condit’s (2000, this
volume) hypothesis on the relative underrepresentation of unique items, and
also Mauranen’s (2000) findings on word combinations. Since the latter studies
were based on lexis, Eskola’s syntactic results provide an important support.
Eskola’s finding that the differences between translations from Russian and
Finnish originals are greater than between translations from English vis-a-vis
Finnish originals are in line with Mauranen’s lexical results (this volume).
Jarmo Harri Jantunen takes up the methodological issues involved in the
quest for universals with the help of comparable target-language corpora.
His study is also based on a subsection of the Corpus of Translated Finnish
(CTF). His particular focus is on lexical patterning, more specifically nearsynonymous
frequent intensifiers, but the main objective of the paper is to
present a quantitative methodological solution for investigating the influence
of the SL on translations. The three-phase method of comparisons is enabled
by the compilation principles of the CTF, and Jantunen takes pains to explore
the suitability of various statistical measures for discovering meaningful
regularities in the data in a reliable way. His findings are interestingly complex
in that the very small selection of near-synonyms showed different patterning
both in terms of collocations and colligations, and the main conclusion is that
it is imperative to continue fine-tuned research into specific cases to be able to
appreciate the extension of SL influence and other determinants of difference
and similarity in translated and untranslated language.
The third section, Testing the basics, is devoted to papers in which some
basic assumptions on the specificity of translated language are tested with
different parallel and comparable corpora. The section is opened by Per-Ola
Nilsson, who reports on a methodologically rigorous corpus-driven study
of translation-specific lexicogrammar in texts translated from English into
Swedish. The quantitative comparison of original and translated Swedish reveals
that in the translated text corpus, the grammatical word av as well as many
collocational patterns and frameworks including av were significantly overrepresented.
Nilsson uses the fiction part of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus
(ESPC), which with its aligned subcorpus enables him to move on to the search
for causes for this overrepresentation. The analysis shows a strong structural
correspondence between English sources and Swedish translations: the transfer