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198 Pekka Kujamäki
interference” (Toury 1995:275), i.e. the hypotheses about the influence of the
source text surface structure on translated target-language use. Conditioned by
the source text, learners’ translation processes produce a distinct distribution
of lexical choices that give the target text “a taste of translationese” (Tirkkonen-
Condit 2002:12) and in any case make the text semantically more explicit
than their non-translated expressions. As such these results comply with earlier
findings on features of translated language, whether obtained from empirical
tests on novices or professionals (e.g. Snell-Hornby 1983) or from research on
larger corpora of authentic translated or non-translated texts (e.g. Olohan &
Baker 2000; Eskola, this volume; Tirkkonen-Condit 2000 and this volume).
It is therefore convenient to sum up the results of this experiment with
Toury’s comment on the data provided by Snell-Hornby’s above mentioned
experiment:
It would seem, then, that even people who are well aware of so-called native
“situational equivalents”, and use them in comparable native-like situations,
tend to ignore them as translational replacements, even if they are trained to
try and establish translation relationships on the highest possible level (as the
subjects of this experiment, being students of translation in a modern institute,
definitely were). To me this is highly indicative of the fact that the very need
to “communicate in translated utterances” (Toury 1980) imposes patterns of
its own, a statement which certainly deserves some more consideration – and
specification. In experimental methods too. (Toury 1991:50, my italics)
Toury’s conclusion is easy to agree with. With respect to classroom practice I
would like to add, as implied by the added italics above, that such observations
are also pedagogically relevant: is it really the case that our students try to
establish translation relationships on the highest possible level?
If we take, once more, a look at the students’ translations, it is easy to see
that the translations that did not use, for example, the Finnish realia keli share
one feature, namely the semantic component “condition”, which was manifested
in the source texts either as (-)verhältnisse or as conditions. Aspointed
out in the beginning, it is a semantic component that is not expressed in the
Finnish word. All in all, the students’ target texts imply an adherence to a
concept of translation that involves an understanding and rendering of words
or, at best, of sentences rather than texts let alone scenes behind the source
text’s linguistic surface. Seen from the perspective of the control test, it seems
that students are unable or reluctant to “dive” into the context and exploit it
for reconstructing the situation and for releasing themselves of the SL-surface
structure to fully construct the scene or the mental model involved in the text.
Hence students do not find natural TL frames for the given scene. In research