Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

“Unique items” in learners’ translations 195
evidence from corpus-based as well as from process research on translation,
Tirkkonen-Condit suspects in her recent article a
filtering element in the translation process which directs the translator’s mind
to those linguistic elements in the target language that do have linguistic
counterparts. This filter blinds the translator so that s/he tends to overlook
the unique linguistic items. (Tirkkonen-Condit 2002:16)
As Tirkkonen-Condit (2000) notes, if the filtered literal equivalents make perfect
sense and do not (seem to) violate the target language norms, translators
may find no immediate reason to give them a second thought. As a consequence,
unique items (such as hanki, keli and kinos in this experiment) are
used only occasionally and – as Tirkkonen-Condit’s research on “verbs of sufficiency”
and Finnish clitic pragmatic particles (ibid.) from the comparable
corpus of translated and non-translated Finnish indicates – less frequently in
translated than in non-translated Finnish.
However, the present small-scale translation test does not allow comparisons
or generalizations of this kind yet, as we have no information about
the learners’ non-translated utterances. The translation test leaves one essential
question unanswered, namely, to what extent the learners really actively use or
passively know the studied realia keli, hanki and kinos.
6. A control test
To answer this question, a small control test was created in order to compile (an
imitation of) a comparable corpus of students’ language use in translated and
non-translated utterances. The control test involves a mixture of a “cloze test”,
inspired by an empirical test conducted by Mary Snell-Hornby (1983; see also
Vannerem and Snell-Hornby 1986), and the method of “picking out scene elements
in a frame” introduced by Paul Kussmaul (see e.g. 2000a, 2000b) to enhance
the processes of creative translation in classroom situations. Both Snell-
Hornby’s and Kussmaul’s ideas are based on the cognitive model of scenes-andframes
by Fillmore (1977). Snell-Hornby uses a “mini-cloze” (Toury 1991:48)
and a visual presentation of the same text to collect spontaneous supplements
for one missing simile. In other words, Snell-Hornby is looking for habitualized
linguistic choices, frames, that get regularly associated with a certain mental, in
this case verbalized or visualized picture, i.e. a scene. These choices are subsequently
compared with the students’ translations of the same text and the same
simile. In Kussmaul’s method, in turn, the meaning of a specific word is dis-