Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Clause connectives in Finnish children’s literature 173
(3) Vuorokaudessa ei ollut tarpeeksi tunteja, jotta Cara olisi ehtinyt tehdä
kaiken, mitä piti.
literally: ‘There weren’t enough hours in a day for Cara to have time to do
everything that had to be done.’
(4) On liian pimeää, jotta hän voisi kävellä turvallisesti.
‘It’s too dark for him to walk safely.’
On the basis of the children’s subcorpora used in this study, these combinations
with jotta can perhaps be considered translation specific colligations in the
genre of children’s literature, but this finding is not generalisable to other
genres. Again, the translations are likely to reflect ST constructions.
4.2 Connectives more frequent in Finnish originals
The lower frequency of the relative pronoun jossa (sg.)/joissa (pl.) ‘in which’,
‘where’ in translations might be partly caused by the common use of corresponding
participial attribute constructions, which was detected in the previous
research (Puurtinen 1995). Another option which might occasionally be
preferred to jo(i)ssa in translations when referring to location is missä ‘where’.
Indeed, missä is slightly more common in translations than in originals (26.3
vs. 17.4, including only those occurrences where missä and jo(i)ssa are both
equally feasible alternatives). Perhaps the English where tends to get translated
as missä rather than jo(i)ssa. Nevertheless, even the combined frequency of
missä + jo(i)ssa turns out to be higher in Finnish originals (92.4 vs. 71.8) with
no apparent reason.
Finally, the contexts and functions of the concessive conjunction vaikka
‘(al)though’ show some interesting differences between originals and translations.
One potential explanation for the somewhat lower frequency of vaikka in
translations is choosing the longer construction siitä huolimatta että or huolimatta
siitä että as a more direct equivalent for despite the fact that. However,
this construction hardly occurs at all in either subcorpus (1.0 in originals, 1.2 in
translations). Two verb forms used in connection with vaikka seem to be more
commonintranslations:vaikka + verb + the clitic particle -kin/kaan (21.8 vs.
15.0) and vaikka + the conditional -isi (20.1 vs. 13.4). The only context, or
meaning, of vaikka which is more typical of Finnish originals is ‘on the other
hand’, ‘but’; in other words, vaikka is not always a concessive conjunction but
can also begin an afterthought of a kind to the previous clause and could be
replaced with tosin, kylläkin, mutta, ortoisaalta, as in the following examples
from the subcorpus of Finnish originals.