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8 Introduction
suggests that subtler differences obtain between different subcorpora and in
the specific usage of different connectors.
Both Puurtinen and Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit, whose article closes the
third section, use the comparable Corpus of Translated Finnish as their data.
Tirkkonen-Condit’s point of departure is the hypothesis on allegedly universal
overrepresentation of those linguistic features in translation that are typical of
the target language. She challenges this view by comparing the frequencies of
anumberofFinnishverbsofsufficiencyaswellasofsomecliticpragmatic
particles – two examples of “unique items” that are very typical of the Finnish
language but lack linguistic counterparts in English, the source language here.
This is why – as Tirkkonen-Condit’s hypothesis reads – they do not suggest
themselves as first choices for translation. The hypothesis of the relative
underrepresentation of target language-specific features is therefore a new
candidate among universals. The author discusses the overall results of the
comparison and combines them with observations on the translation process
in general.
The concept of “unique items” is taken up by Pekka Kujamäki, who opens
the fourth and final section Universals in the translation class. Toshowhis
students the function of Toury’s “law of interference” Kujamäki compares
students’ translated Finnish with their English and German source texts and
with their non-translated language use as revealed by a small cloze test. The
experiment indicates a strong adherence to the surface structure of the source
texts in student translations, in which – neatly in compliance with Tirkkonen-
Condit’s above hypothesis – straightforward lexical or dictionary equivalents of
the English and German stimuli suggest themselves as translations much more
easily than the more natural sounding “unique items” of the target language.
Finally, Riitta Jääskeläinen closes the volume with a report on a research
project in progress which aims at discovering whether and in which ways
students of translation can be made aware of the stylistic function of repetition
in texts. Her point of departure is an observation in the translation class which
complies with one assumed translation universal, namely, that students tend to
clean away repetition from their translations. Jääskeläinen compares students’
translations that are produced with or without “sensitivity training”, and relates
their strategies to different mechanisms at work in translation.
A recurrent issue in many if not all of the papers in this volume is
whether the term ‘translation universal’ is felicitous, and many writers seem
to be somewhat uneasy about it, suggesting other, related terms according to
personal preferences. However, they do not object seriously enough to deny the
usefulness of the concept as a tool, at least provisionally, at least for the present.