Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

“Unique items” in learners’ translations 189
native speakers, and finally back-translated into Finnish by 36 students in
Savonlinna as well as in Tampere. At the next phase the translated items were
compared with students’ non-translated language use as revealed by a smallscale
cloze test.
This article discusses the results and some implications of the experiment.
The experiment took place in the context of translation exercises, which usually
involve some kind of normative statements and value judgements (Chesterman
1993a). Nevertheless, in this article the approach is mainly descriptive, the
pedagogic goal is to make learners aware of what they are doing by identifying
at least some features of their task performance, to show their consequences,
and to challenge students’ vague views on what translation is all about.
2. Unique items
The concept of “unique items” has been recently introduced by Tirkkonen-
Condit, who suggests that it might be a universal tendency of translated language
“to manifest smaller proportions of such language forms and functions
which do not have straightforward equivalents in other languages” and, in particular,
in the source language in question (Tirkkonen-Condit 2000, my emphasis;
see also Tirkkonen-Condit this volume). “Unique items” can be seen as
a rather broad and dynamic category of linguistic features which covers lexical,
phrasal, syntactic or textual elements (Tirkkonen-Condit 2000) and even
pragmatic functions (Mauranen 2001) and whose extension is usually different
from one language pair to another. The emphasis on “straightforward” refers
to the fact that these elements or functions need not be untranslatable at all:
Rather, very often they seem to have only partially overlapping equivalents
in other languages, i.e. equivalents that tend to explicate their implicit SL
meaning, which is part of the world knowledge of the SL user.
(Tirkkonen-Condit 2000, my italics)
In other words, lexical items such as the Finnish expressions for “snow”
(hanki, kinos, nuoska etc.) very often carry semantic-pragmatic distinctions
that are usually not habitual or necessary in any other languages. Or they
may be items that are semantically ambiguous in the sense that they can be
used in different pragmatic situations, in which the L1 speaker usually knows
automatically what is meant by the word. For instance the Finnish word keli
(‘surface conditions’) can be used in different contexts with reference to driving
conditions on the road, to skiing conditions in the woods or even to sailing