Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

What happens to “unique items”
in learners’ translations?
“Theories” and “concepts” as a challenge
for novices’ views on “good translation”
Pekka Kujamäki
University of Joensuu
This article reports on an experiment, in which two components of translator
students’ professional self-understanding were challenged: their doubts on
the relevance of theoretical knowledge as part of their professional
competence as well as the strong belief in their L1 competence. The
experiment draws on Toury’s “law of interference” and the analysis of
students’ translations is based on Tirkkonen-Condit’s hypothesis that unique,
TL-specific elements may be underrepresented in translations. Students’
translations of short English and German source texts are consistent with this
hypothesis: the experiment reveals that even a source text that seems to
present no translation difficulties in surface structure is still a powerful
constraint in translation and produces language patterns which are alien to
or at least deviant from non-translated target language usage as revealed in
this experiment by a small-scale cloze test.
1. Introduction
From the very beginning, students of translation seem to have a strong but
biased understanding of the essential components of their competence and
how to develop them. One common impression that manages to survive
despite the challenges presented by teaching is their suspicious view of the role
of theoretical knowledge as an essential part of their studies as well as of their
competence. “Theory is theory and practice is practice”, is the argument that
a teacher of e.g. research seminars is regularly confronted with. Theorising is
seen as a self-sufficient activity, linked to translator students’ lives only to make
it difficult and to take learners’ time from practical translation exercises. And