Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

136 Per-Ola Nilsson
Table 2. Distribution of the colligational pattern locative noun+av in Swedish
original and translated fiction texts in the ESPC
Pattern Sw. orig. fiction Sw. trans. fiction
änden av ‘the end of’ 4 19
baksidan av ‘the back of’ 6 9
insidan av ‘the inside of’ 2 9
sidan av ‘the side of’ 14 27
mitten av ‘the middle of’ 2 14
utkanten av ‘the edge of’ 3 11
foten av ‘the foot of’ 1 7
hörnet av ‘the corner of’ 0 4
början av ‘the beginning of’ 8 18
slutet av ‘the end of’ 6 29
närheten av ‘the vicinity of’ 9 16
Total 55 163
and for this reason the distribution over individual files is not accounted for in
this context. 2
One example of a group of collocational patterns with a higher frequency
in the translated texts is a specific type of nominal head: locative nouns,
followed by av as a related structure word. Table 2 shows the distribution of
these constructions in the two subcorpora.
The scope of analysis can be expanded further to the left to incorporate
discontinuous triplets, frameworks where the noun + av patterns above may be
one of several collocation types included here. Table 3 shows the distribution
of a range of frameworks of the type preposition + X + av.
The combinations in Table 2 are in total around three times as common
in the translated texts as in the original texts. The figures in Table 3 also
reveal quite a significant degree of overrepresentation of frameworks of this
type in the translated texts. Seeking an explanation for these differences of
distribution, a relevant first question to ask is to what extent the translational
renderings go back to structurally similar SL patterns and to what extent they
are a result of several different types of SL structures converging, as it were, into
one rendering (cf. Figure 2 above).
For the collocational category änden av, there is a high degree of structural
correspondence between sources and translations – as could be expected for
this type of phrase pattern, which is common and acceptable in Swedish: 15 of
the 19 cases (cf. Table 2) can be said to exhibit structural correspondence. The
range of source nouns lies semantically close to the noun in the translational