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178 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit
equivalents, as there is no obvious linguistic stimulus for them in the source
text. Thus it might in fact be a universal tendency in translations to manifest
smaller proportions of such language forms and functions which do not have
similarly manifested linguistic counterparts in the source language. In other
words, linguistic elements that are ‘unique’ in this sense would have lower
frequencies in translated texts than in originally produced texts.
The frequency of unique items may affect the impression that a text makes
on readers. I have some empirical ground to believe that the frequency of
unique items influences the impression that the text makes on ordinary readers.
A low frequency leads readers to think that the text is a translation, and a high
frequency leads them to think that the text is original rather than translation.
I carried out a test (see Tirkkonen-Condit 1998/2002) in which I asked native
Finnish speakers to sort out a number of authentic text extracts into two piles:
translated and original Finnish. When I analysed the two piles I noticed that
the single linguistic phenomenon shared by those texts which most readers
believed to be original texts – whether this was in fact the case or not –
was their relatively high frequency of the unique elements. It is now possible
to investigate the actual frequency of the unique items from the Corpus of
Translated Finnish, which is a comparable corpus (see Mauranen 1998), and
my purpose in this paper is to report on the results of this investigation.
2. Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test the Unique Items Hypothesis by checking
the frequencies of some verbs and clitic particles using the Corpus of Translated
Finnish which has been compiled at Savonlinna in a research project supervised
by Professor Anna Mauranen. The verbs investigated here are verbs
of sufficiency which constitute a lexical domain with no straightforward lexicalized
translation equivalents in many Indo-European languages. These verbs
have also attracted the attention of researchers of Finnish. Aili Flint’s doctoral
dissertation (Flint 1980) gives a semantic account of some forty such verbs.
The clitic particles investigated in the corpus are -kin and -hAn. The
translation of the particle -kin depends on its pragmatic function, and in
different contexts it translates differently, e.g. with the connectors also, but,
in contrast, consequently, thus. The clitic particle -hAn is also multifunctional,
and it usually conveys the assumption of shared knowledge along the same
linesastheparticleyou know in spoken English (see Hakulinen 1976; Östman
1981, 1995).