Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

206 Riitta Jääskeläinen
as a result, some of the translations were clearly summarised versions. These
observations made me look for an explanation for the students’ behaviour and
to think about finding a remedy.
One potential explanation for the students’ behaviour is offered by one
of the assumed universals of translation: the avoidance of repetitions which
occur in the source text. Gideon Toury (1991:188) argues that the avoidance
of repetitions is “one of the most persistent, unbending norms in translation
in all languages studied so far”. According to Toury (ibid.) avoiding repetition
takes place “irrespective of the many functions repetitions may have in particular
source texts,” which is supported by my classroom observations. Toury’s
argument is also supported by research evidence from professional translation
(e.g. Blum-Kulka and Levenston 1983, quoted in Laviosa-Braithwaite
1998:289; Toury 1991). It has been suggested that the (apparently universal)
tendency to avoid repetition results from the assumed linguistic norms and
rules of good writing, which the translators tend to follow as good professional
text-producers.
Partly to test whether “avoidance of repetitions” is indeed at work among
the novices and partly to try out a remedy (sensitising students to the stylistic
functions of repetition), I decided to carry out a small research project in my
translation courses. 1 In short, the idea was to ask one group of students to
translate the text “blind,” while another group would be given instructions
on style analysis, and to find out whether any systematic differences could be
identified between the two groups of translations.
In what follows, I will first introduce the research design, the source text,
and the translation brief as well as the instructions on style analysis which were
given to the students. Then I will discuss examples from my material. At this
point of the research project I have looked at isolated (and random) examples
of repetition in the ST and their translations to determine whether a more
detailed analysis of the functions and translations of repetition in the whole
text would make any sense. That is, the following observations do not relate to
the whole text, but apply only to a few randomly selected examples.
2. Research design
The research material has been collected as part of the students’ first course
in translation from English into Finnish; the students who take the course are
first-year students with English (translation and interpreting) as their major
subject, which makes them clearly novices in translation. With the exception of