Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

166 Tiina Puurtinen
(1996) and Baker (1995, 1996) have presented hypotheses about the different
frequencies of the optional that-connective in translated and original English
texts, and Olohan and Baker (2000) report on a corpus-based study which
shows that that is in fact more frequent in reported speech in translated than
in original English.
This article focuses on particular explicit signals of clausal relations in
children’s literature translated into and originally written in Finnish, i.e. explicitation
is here discussed as a potentially distinctive quality of translations in
comparison with non-translated TL texts of the same type (as a “T-universal”,
see Chesterman in this volume). The question addressed below is whether
clausal relations, or relations between propositions, are actually expressed more
explicitly in translations, as the explicitation hypothesis suggests, by using a
higher frequency of clause connectives such as conjunctions, specific adverbs
and relative pronouns. An interesting, relevant study by Øverås (1998) has
investigated a number of different cohesion markers in translations between
English and Norwegian, and found that added connectives and replacement
of connectives with more explicit ones are forms of cohesive explicitation in
translations. Thus, in Øverås’s study explicitation is examined as potential
shifts between STs and TTs with no reference to comparable original TL
texts, and therefore her findings are unfortunately not directly comparable to
mine. Nevertheless, Øverås’s research is interesting in that it includes similar
cohesive ties as the ones in focus here, and the investigated texts represent
fictional prose.
Mauranen’s corpus-based study (2000) compares translated and nontranslated
Finnish texts, but the text type is different: academic prose and
popular non-fiction. The analysis deals with text-reflexive (metatextual) expressions,
including a number of connectors, and reveals that most connectors
have roughly equal frequencies in translations and originals, with a slightly
higher occurrence in translations. The main exception is toisaalta (‘on the other
hand’), which has over twice as many instances in Finnish originals as in translations;
it has a tendency to combine with another connector (mutta ‘but’, myös
‘also’, vaikka ‘although’) in Finnish originals (cf. this result with my findings on
kun in Section 4.1. below).
2. Explicitation of clausal relations
Since language use, including translation, is a matter of choosing between
alternative ways of expressing meanings, and a particular choice is interesting