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“Unique items” in learners’ translations 191
Tirkkonen-Condit’s above hypotheses and her results from the comparable
Corpus of Translated Finnish (CTF) lead us rather to assume that in learners’
translations unique items of Finnish are used less than so called lexical or wordfor-word
translations that are stimulated by the English or German source text
surface structure (as seen in the right column of Table 1).
3. Design of the translation test
The source texts used in the translation experiment were themselves translations
produced by native speakers of German and English respectively from a
Finnish text written by the present writer. This arrangement was necessary for
the following reasons:
In experimentation, the difficulty of the source text is one potential variable
among many others in translator performance. As Riitta Jääskeläinen
(1999:245) points out, it is “likely to influence the number of problems and
the choice of appropriate strategies, but also the subjects’ ability and/or willingness”
to perform the task according to given specifications. Students’ translation
performance, be it in experimentation or in “normal” classroom practice,
is very vulnerable to source text difficulty. With difficult texts the risk of
frustration and tiredness is high, as a great deal of students’ effort during the
translation task can be taken up by extensive source text processing alone (see
Jääskeläinen 1999:198; Jääskeläinen & Tirkkonen-Condit 1991). For the purposes
of this experiment, in which target language rendering was in focus, I
needed a text which allowed students to concentrate on target text production
instead of investing too much energy in understanding and analysing the
source text. Consequently, I needed a source text that would put the students
in a thematic context that was an inherent part of their world knowledge.
To make this experiment as convenient as possible for students (i.e. to have
as short a translation task as possible) and for myself (to avoid a weary search
in newspapers, magazines, the Internet etc. for a short text that could be used
in an experiment of this kind), I created a text of my own dealing with driving
a car in Finland in winter. In this Finnish text I inserted the above mentioned
more or less culture-specific realia keli, kinos and hanki. This Finnish text was
then translated into English and German by my native speaker colleagues (see
Appendix 1). 1 Their commission was to regard the source text as a first part of
a longer text which was to be translated and published on the web site of the
National Motoring Organisation in Finland (http://www.autoliitto.fi/eng.cfm