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188 Pekka Kujamäki
we know that this line of thinking is common among professional translators
as well (see e.g. Chesterman 1993b; Hönig 1995:25, 158). However, if we dig
deeper into this view – e.g. by eliciting explicit written commentaries – it soon
turns out that students’ frustration often comes from their experiences in the
translation class, where, in the name of practice, “theories” and “concepts” are
still too often kept out of everyday business.
Another common feature of translator students’ (semi)professional selfunderstanding
is the unfaltering belief in their L1 (in this case: Finnish)
competence when they translate from the FL. In L1 translation students seem
to regard comprehension of the FL source text as the main problem of the
task,sothatafterhavingunderstoodthetext–andtakingintoaccountthe
purpose of the translation – the formulation of an adequate and natural
target language text should be no problem. One interesting expression of this
(perhaps learned) faith was a discussion on Toury’s “law of interference” (1995:
275) with my 3rd year seminar students in spring 2001: it turned out that in
this era of functionally oriented translation, learners do not (dare to) regard
“translationese” or “interference” as relevant topics of research on the (most
certainly learned) argument that “these phenomena should not exist anyhow”.
In face of the evidence provided by descriptive research on translation so far
(e.g. by Toury himself 1995:206–220) this reasoning sounds rather odd. But
when compared with the line of argumentation for example in Schmidt (1989),
where “interference” is defined either as avoidable deviations from correct
target language usage or as insufficient and incomplete reception of the source
text (Holz-Mänttäri 1989:132), such commentaries make, after all, perfect
sense (for a broader view on interference see e.g. Mauranen, this volume,
Eskola, this volume).
These two observations provoked me to carry out a small experiment. The
idea was, on one hand, to question this self-confidence and show students
that even a source text that seems to present no translation difficulties in
surface structure (e.g. in the form of potential “false friends”) is still a powerful
constraint in translation and very likely to produce language patterns in
translation which are alien to or deviant from general target-language usage.
For this purpose – as well as to argue, on the other hand, for the applicability of
at least some “concepts” and “theories” in classroom practice – the experiment
was based on Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit’s hypotheses (2000, 2002: 16 and this
volume) that TL-specific elements, “unique items”, may be underrepresented
in translations. I created a short text that deals with driving in Finland in
winter and includes several “unique” nouns, which refer to snow or Finnish
weather conditions. The text was translated into German and English by