Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

192 Pekka Kujamäki
and link “Motoring in Finland”). These texts, then, were given to students as
new source texts, with their origin as translated texts hidden. Their assignment
was specified as follows: the text (sample) is to be translated for the magazine
Etumatkaa – a quarterly customer magazine of the Volkswagen group in
Finland. Its winter issue plans to publish articles where foreigners write on
their driving experiences in Finland in winter. In Appendix 2, the scanned
excerpt of the customer leaflet posted by the local Volkswagen dealer in autumn
2001 reveals the thematic relevance of such translation tasks and provides one
authentic text example of the above discussed item keli.
The German text “Winter, oh weh!” was translated in Savonlinna by
students of my 3rd year proseminar group in April 2001 (test group A; N =
13), as part of my 2nd year course Translation German-Finnish in September
2001 (group B; N = 10), and additionally in Tampere by a couple of 2nd and
4th year students of German Translation and Interpretation (group C; N = 6).
Finally, the translation of the English text “An Ordinary Winter’s Tale” was
provided by seven Savonlinna students of the English 3rd year proseminar
group in September 2001 (group D), bringing the total to 36 translations. 2
The students were allowed to do their translation when and where they chose
(alone, however, and within the limits of a rather loose deadline) and to consult
the reference material they normally use.
Before we take a closer look at the students’ solutions, a caveat may be in
order. Since the source texts are translations of a fabricated Finnish-language
text, no normative comparisons between the Finnish original and the learners’
translations are to be made. The way I look into the translational solutions with
a specific interest in selected culture-specific realia does not imply that only the
use of these realia in target texts equals a correct translation and excludes the
others. Rather, the main interest is – in the class-room situation as well as in the
later steps of this experiment – didactic: what do the translations as products
possibly tell learners about their own processes?
4. “Unique items” in learners’ translations?
The results of the translation test are shown in Tables 2, 3 and 4. The summaries
show translational patterns in favour of solutions that are directly motivated
by the lexical surface structure of the source texts in question. The tendency
to overlook rather than to use realia such as hanki, keli and kinos is clear
and as such consistent with the above hypothesis concerning unique items in
translation into L1. In each case all test groups show a very similar distribution: