Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

140 Per-Ola Nilsson
Apart from supplying empirical results such as the above, the study also
brings methodological issues to the fore, as well as questions regarding comparability.
From a comparability point of view, the question is in what respects
corpora can be said to be comparable if they are proposed to be comparable
and are used as being so. In the case of the fiction texts used here, for instance,
the differences for lexical collocations (e.g. vid sidan av; ‘bytheside
of’) may say more about culturally conditioned genre differences (in this case,
perhaps, description of positions of objects in the world in certain genres of fiction)
than about systemic linguistic contrast. 3 Collocational frameworks on the
other hand, even if incorporating many possibly genre-related lexical patterns,
may be slightly more interesting from the point of view of the linguistically
oriented study of translations, since they reveal more about the ways in which
basic and frequent lexicogrammatical source language patterning is treated in
translation.
As for method, the exemplified way of using quantitative data for the definition
of the specific linguistic object of study represents a connection between
theory (hypothesis) and method in the sense that specific collocational patterning
in translated texts is assumed to be a sufficiently typical and general
feature of translated texts so as to be reflected on a global quantitative level even
though it may not be a salient feature in any one translated text in isolation.
This in turn leads on to the reception aspect of translation: Since patterns occur
as generally in translated TL texts as in original TL texts as well as being more
frequent in translated texts, they can reasonably be assumed to constitute a feature
typical of Swedish fiction texts translated from English, at least within the
time period and genre span covered by the corpus. On these grounds, the described
patterns can be assumed to collectively contribute to the effect of a text
being perceived as translated, along with other translation-specific patterning,
collocational or other.
Notes
1. This study is being carried out as part of a project financed by The Bank of Sweden
Tercentenary Foundation.
2. A calculation of individual distribution of items may however yield relevant information
about the properties of specific translated corpus texts (cf. Nilsson 2002).
3. This “aboutness” of texts may in turn be contrasted with linguistic conventions of literary
texts in a culture, such as for instance the usage of certain reporting verbs and formulae
incorporating these (cf. Gellerstam 1996).