Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Unique items – over- or under-represented? 183
unique elements tend to be less frequent also in published translations than in
original writing.
5. Conclusion
The reasons why the unique linguistic phenomena tend to be under-represented
in translated language may be found in a (potentially universal) tendency of the
translating process to proceed literally to a certain extent. This means that the
translator picks out lexical items, syntactic patterns and idiomatic expressions
from his bilingual mental dictionary, and this is what happens. The has enough
pattern tends to generate the on tarpeeksi pattern and the connectors also, thus,
and others tend to generate connectors myös, niinpä etc. Since the verbs and
the particles discussed here do not have linguistic counterparts, they do not
appear in the bilingual mental dictionary and there is nothing in the source
text that would trigger them off as immediate equivalents. Thus they have a
slighter chance to be chosen into the target text than they have of appearing in
texts that are produced in the original.
Note
1. The verbs are introduced in their third person singular forms. Thus ehtii can be glossed
as ‘has enough time to. . .’ or ‘is early enough’.
References
Eskola, Sari. (this volume). Untypical Frequencies in Translated Language: A Corpus-Based
Study on a Literary Corpus of Translated and Non-Translated Finnish. In A. Mauranen
& P. Kujamäki (Eds.), Translation Universals – Do They Exist? Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Flint, Aili (1980). Semantic Structure in the Finnish Lexicon: Verbs of Possibility and
Sufficiency. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Güttinger, Fritz (1963). Zielsprache: Theorie und Technik des Übersetzens. Zürich: Manesse
Verlag.
Hakulinen, Auli (1976). Liitepartikkelin -han/-hän syntaksia ja pragmatiikkaa [On the
syntax and pragmatics of the clitic particle -hAn]. Meddelanden från Åbo Akademi
Forskningsinstitut, 7, 1–60.
Östman, Jan-Ola (1981). ‘You know’: A discourse-functional approach [Pragmatics and
Beyond II: 7]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.