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Probabilistic explanations in translation studies 19
Hebrew translational replacements of the English speech organizer oh
(= another recurring word)
under the same sets of circumstances
Hebrew translational replacements of an English speech organizer (= a
whole functional category as realized in one particular language). Its
treatment presupposes the establishment of correlations between various
realizations like well and oh, including combinations such as oh, well or
well, well.
Hebrew translational replacements of speech organizers in general (= a
super-linguistic category). Presupposes work on a number of different
target languages first the translational treatment of semantically depleted
lexical items (a category which is more inclusive still) in the Hebrew
context changes in all the above practices over time:
in phylogenesis
in ontogenesis
the whole list repeated for a [series of] different target language[s] the
whole list repeated once again for the sum-total of target languages (or
for ‘target language’ in general, and hence maybe of translation as such) 4
The main point relevant to our concerns should have become visible by now.
One way of making it more explicit would be to adopt the distinction between
‘regularities of performance’ and ‘regularities in the system’: the first one would
be expressed as frequencies (e.g. “the frequency of the occurrence of the lexeme
u-vexen as a Hebrew replacement of English well in the translation of text X
by translator Y is 99/100”), the other one – in probabilistic terms (e.g. “the
likelihood that an existing Hebrew speech organizer will replace an English
one in prose fiction translations of the 1950s is three times lower than it would
be in the 1960s”).
It is clear that the two notions are distinct, but not unconnected. In
fact, “Frequency in text is the instantiation of probability in the system”, as
Michael A.K. Halliday put it in a seminal article on the use of probabilistic
interpretations in linguistics (1991a:42). In other words, “The system may
have infinite potential; but it engenders a finite body of text, and text can be
counted” (1991a:41). 5
Frequencies can thus be tackled in a direct way, on the basis of surface
realizations of more abstract categories, whereas probabilities will always be
a number of further steps removed. Actually, says Hans Reichenbach in the
1948 edition of his Theory of Probability, “probability [is] the limit of the
infinite series representing the frequency”, where ‘limit’ is used in a purely