Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

182 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit
do not therefore suggest themselves as first choices for translators, even where
they would fit the context very well. When the has enough/is enough pattern
appears in an English source text, the translator is led to imitate the pattern
and to generate on tarpeeksi instead of one of the above verbs. The clitics, too,
can easily be dismissed in translation, since thus translates by niinpä, also by
myös, but by mutta,etc.
Translation scholars have noted this type of source language dependence
before, but it has not been studied systematically in corpora. Katharina Reiss
pointed out the problem of “missing words” in her book on translation quality
assessment (Reiss 1971). She suspected that translators did not perhaps fully
exploit the linguistic resources of the target language. As one of the devices
for translation criticism to be used without recourse to the source text, Reiss
suggests in line with Güttinger (1963: 219), that you carry out a simple
test. Take the most frequent words in the target language that do not exist
in the source language and check the extent to which these appear in the
translation. These “missing words” will reveal whether the translator knows
the target language well enough to attain good translation quality. This rule
of thumb, according to Reiss (1971: 19), applies not only to the “missing
words”, but to “alle Begriffe und Wendungen, die in der anderen Sprache mit
unterschiedlichen sprachlichen Mitteln zum Ausdruck gebracht werden”.
Miriam Shlesinger (1992) noticed in student translators a failure to lexicalize
– to use one word instead of many – in instances where the source language
expressed the idea with several words, whereas the target language would have
called for a single word equivalent. This tendency was noticed in professional
translators, too, and not only in students. Thus the English words deadline and
shortlist did not readily find their way even to the English translators’ texts who
translated from Hebrew into their mother tongue.
Gideon Toury (1995:224–225) suggests that translation as a process causes
a tendency to resort to expressions that bear resemblance to the SL rather
than expressions that are typical in a similar context in the target language.
Toury (1995:225) suggests that “this is highly indicative of the fact that the
requirement to communicate in translated utterances may impose behavioural
patterns of its own.” The literal equivalents and attempts to translate word
by word are very frequent in think aloud protocols of translation even in
the performance of translators whose target texts do not show a tendency
to translate word for word. The literal expressions may be used as a way to
‘listen to’ what the expression means prior to venturing a translation proper.
If the literal equivalent makes perfect sense and does not violate the target
language norms, there is no immediate reason to discard it. This is why the