Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

156 Vilma Pápai
his former prison guard – althoug he was wearing a well-pressed suit –
who used to torture him so much in a POW camp, stood silently staring
at him for a moment or two, then threw his champagne into the startled
Japanese man’s face.
The extensive/wide set of explicitation strategies identified in the parallel
corpus provides insight into the translation process in terms of shifts triggered
by a number of factors: the translators’ conscious or unconscious strategy, or
the style of the translators or the language community, genre conventions or
translation norms, just to mention a few.
4.2 Shifts in explicitness
The comparison of translated and non-translated texts of HHC constitutes the
second analysis. Table 4 shows the distribution of frequencies of features of text
explicitness in the comparable corpus. The most relevant comparison is that
made between the original (O) and translated (T) Hungarian texts of HHC.
The data show that in 16 cases out of 20 (80%) the frequencies of features
investigated in translated text outnumber the frequencies in original text. The
most dominant difference was found in the case of derivatives közötti ‘among’ +
[adjectival suffix] and belüli ‘in’ + [adjectival suffix] with no instances in
original texts as opposed to 21 instances in translated texts.
Only in four cases do items conflict with the hypothesis: való ‘being’,amely
‘which, that’, tehát‘consequently’,is‘as well, too’ (Table 4). The most striking
results concern the use of való, an empty participle, and tehát, aconjunctof
consequence. There are 20 occurrences in the original texts for való as opposed
to 8 in translated texts, and 18 : 7 for tehát. Thewordvaló, the participle of
van ‘to be’ fulfils an important syntactic function: it makes the left-branching
of adjectives possible. As the Hungarian and English attributive complements
show a structural difference (see Appendix 2), we expect the frequencies of való
to be higher in texts rendered from an Indo-European language than in texts
produced by Hungarian writers. In other words, we do not expect writers to
use this item more often than translators do under constraints imposed by the
target text or the translation process itself or both; yet they do, with all but one
instance occurring in non-literary texts. As a result, this might be ascribed to
norms governing the use of these items for authors of technical writing.
The higher frequency of való in the non-translated texts, in fact, strongly
contradicts long-held professional views on this question. This unusual patterning
also applies to the conjunction of amely (a relative pronoun) and is