Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

196 Pekka Kujamäki
cussed by picking out details of the scene that belong to this frame, and in this
way students are helped to find more creative translational replacements for
difficult source text frames.
In the present case, “picking out scene elements” was conducted with a
story similar to the above mentioned text in the translation test, which was,
however, told freely by the present experimenter in front of the class. The
idea was to play a helpless translator, who had a minor translation problem
in the form of three missing Finnish words that would make the text complete.
The students’ task was, then, to picture with the given elements of the story
this specific scene and write down for each of the three gaps those (max. 3)
lexical candidates that they first came up with and that seemed to fit in the
particular, described context. The cloze test was conducted in Savonlinna with
three groups, in total 38 first or second year students (13 + 12 students of
English translation and 13 students of German translation). 3 The results of
the control test are presented in the following two tables:
Table 5. Students’ proposals for the missing word, cloze item “keli”
“Keli” First choice Second choice Third choice Total / N = 38:
keli 26 5 2 33
ilma, sää (‘weather’) 6 10 6 22
others: tuuri, mäihä (‘luck’), 6 4 1 11
weather
As can be seen in Table 5, as many as 33 students out of 38 suggested
the word keli for the first “problematic” gap, and 26 of them gave it as their
first candidate. On this basis it seems justified to maintain that these words
still are habitualized nouns, even in students’ language use, when it is not
constrained by foreign language stimuli. Other, clearly less frequent candidates
include situationally adequate expressions such as “weather” and expressions
like “luck”, which reveal a slightly different, though expected and acceptable
interpretation of the scene. One student misunderstood the task altogether and
proposed consequently three English words. Additionally, it is interesting to
observe that in their responses the students never used the expressions ajoolosuhteet,
liikenneolosuhteet and tieolosuhteet that were, in contrast, frequent
in the translated texts.
In the latter two cases of kinos and hanki, asseeninTable6,thevariation
is already wider but the unique items in question are nevertheless still more
frequently used in this non-translational situation than in the translation test:
more than one third of the students use the words kinos and hanki. The