Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

134 Per-Ola Nilsson
3. Using the same criterion of distinctive quantitative distribution as for av,
as an individual grammatical word, the most significantly overrepresented
TL collocational patterns of which av was a part were counted, and
quantitatively compared with the corresponding patterns in the original
TL subcorpus.
This initial quantitative TL verification was then followed by cross-linguistic
qualitative analysis of SL-TL correspondences for selected TL collocational patterns
and frameworks: The TL patterns with distinctive distribution emerging
through steps 1–3 were used as a basis for further, cross-linguistic analysis, in
order to reveal the actual sources of TL collocational patterns. (A further possible
type of investigation, not carried out here, is to compare the TL collocational
patterns in translated texts with the corresponding patterns in original
TL texts; cf. Nilsson 2002.)
3. Results
The Swedish grammatical word av is overrepresented in the translated Swedish
comparable subcorpus, in relation to the subcorpus of original Swedish fiction.
Table 1 shows this difference in distribution, as absolute frequencies and as
percentages of the total number of words in each subcorpus.
The percentages for av in Table 1 reveal a highly uneven distribution in the
two subcorpora – the frequency of the word in the translated texts approaches
almost twice the frequency in the original texts, although the translated subcorpus
as a whole is only around 12 % larger than the original subcorpus.
The question arises how general this distribution is, i.e. to what extent the
overrepresentation can be attributed to overrepresentation in individual texts.
A few basic statistical calculations reveal the following (based on the
number of occurrences of the word av in each corpus text file expressed as a
percentage of the total number of words in the individual file): The minimum
and maximum percentages for individual files in the two subcorpora are 0.39
and 1.45 for the Swedish original texts and 0.75 and 2.21 for the Swedish
translated texts. Expressed in terms of standard deviation, there is only a
Table 1. Distribution of av in Swedish original and translated fiction texts
Sw. orig. fiction % Sw. trans. fiction %
av [‘of’, ‘by’] 2,462 0.8 4,033 1.17