Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Unique items – over- or under-represented
in translated language?
Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit
University of Joensuu
One of the alleged universals of translation is the hypothesis that translations
tend to over-represent linguistic features that are typical of the target
language. On top of being counter-intuitive, this hypothesis seems to lack
substantial empirical support. Among typical features are the linguistic
phenomena that I call unique, i.e. linguistic items or elements which lack
linguistic counterparts in the source language in question (see also Sari
Eskola’s article in this volume). The hypothesis of over-representation would
predict that at least those unique items that are relatively frequent in a
language should appear with a higher frequency in translated than originally
produced language.
The hypothesis was tested by comparing the frequencies of two kinds of
unique items in the Corpus of Translated Finnish, namely the verbs of
sufficiency, such as ehtii, mahtuu, jaksaa, malttaa (‘has enough time’/‘is early
or quick enough’, ‘is small enough’, ‘is strong enough’, ‘is patient enough’,
respectively), and the clitic pragmatic particles -kin and -hAn. The
comparison shows that these uniquely Finnish items are less frequent in
translated than original Finnish. It is suggested that the explanation for their
under-representation in translated language should be sought in the
translation process itself.
1. Introduction
Every language has linguistic elements that are unique in the sense that they
lack straightforward linguistic counterparts in other languages. These elements
may be lexical, phrasal, syntactic or textual, and they need not be in any sense
untranslatable; they are simply not similarly manifested (e.g. lexicalized) in
other languages. Since they are not similarly manifested in the source language,
it is to be expected that they do not readily suggest themselves as translation