Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

18 Gideon Toury
seldom – be either 0 or 1: types of behavior which, in principle, could have
occurred may never have been opted for, in practice, while others may always
be present, irrespective of anything.
However, not only individual instances of translational behavior, but that
of definable bodies as well – whether groups of persons (e.g. so-called ‘schools’
of translators) or groups of acts (or their observable results, i.e. corpora of
‘assumed translations’) 2 – don’t seem to constitute candidates for elevation
to universal-ship; certainly not until the findings have been relativized in
view of the factors defining the group in question, which would involve a
considerable distancing of the vantage point, a kind of ‘zoom out’ motion
resulting in the possibility of regarding an extended field while losing sight
of the minute details. Thus, even if a low-level regularity will later be shown
to be an instantiation of some higher-level universal, the instantiation itself as
revealed when regarded from a short distance will always be local, i.e.normgoverned
or idiosyncratic, typical of a group or an individual, depending on
the size and/or heterogeneity of the object of study.
It is not that norms, even many of the idiosyncrasies, do not imply
regularities, then, because both of them do. It is only that the regularities
they imply are not general enough to be regarded as universals, in terms of
either the population or the scope of the phenomenon examined. When a
low-level phenomenon is tackled within a more extensive, and especially more
heterogeneous corpus, the normal result seems to be an immediate drop of
frequency value. This value will rise again when that phenomenon is no longer
viewed in itself, but as one of a number of possible instantiations of a higherlevel,
more general category (e.g. a recurring replacing word vs. a speech
organizer, or a metaphor).
Consider the following series of research tasks, which is both simplified
and highly partial, skipping many of the possible interim links: 3
Hebrew translational replacements of:
the speech organizer well (= a recurring word)
in one particular story translated from English
in all the stories translated from English
in one particular year
decade
generation
millennium
in English texts of other types
in an English text in general