Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Translation-specific lexicogrammar? 133
1. 2.
SL source a
TL rendering a 1
a
a 1
a 1 a 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a b c d e
1 2 3
TL renderings a , a , a
SL sources a, b, c ...
Figure 2. SL and TL oriented cross-linguistic comparison
picture: When starting the analysis from the TL, the starting point is a welldefined
TL construction – i.e., in the case of a translated text, a translational
rendering – and a paradigm of SL patterns that give rise to it. Thus, where
starting from the SL gives a picture of the multitude of possible translational
solutions to specific types of source text problems, starting from the TL gives
a picture of the multitude of types of source text problems that give rise to
specific types of translational solutions. In other words, a TL oriented method
is well suited to describing what in original texts contributes into giving
translated texts certain specific features.
The procedure of investigation involved the following main steps:
1. A general quantitative comparison was made of original and translated TL
texts so as to reveal any overall patterns of distinctive distribution in translated
TL texts. The word av was the grammatical word showing the most
significant total frequency difference, and was selected for further analysis.
2. The number of occurrences of av in each individual text file in the two
TL subcorpora was recorded, and the generality of occurrence was then
stated for each subcorpus in the form of a value expressing the standard
deviation, i.e. to what extent there was variation around the medium value
of occurrences of the word in the subcorpus, based on the frequency for
each individual corpus text file.