Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

20 Gideon Toury
mathematical sense. Put in slightly different terms, one could perhaps say that
frequency applies first and foremost to things past, whereas probability makes
a claim for validity in the future. Bethatasitmay,inafieldliketranslation,
the best, if not the only way to go about estimating “probabilities for terms in
[. . .] systems” is to proceed from “observed frequencies in [a] corpus” (Halliday
1991a:42).
3. Universals shouldn’t be sought on too high a level either
On the other hand, there are also levels of generality which seem to be too
high for the kinds of universals we are searching for, especially if we wish
those universals to add something to our knowledge and understanding of
translation and to be non-trivial, at the same time. Thus – to me, at least –
sweeping statements of the form translation involves explicitation, 6 or
simplification, ornormalization, are at least suspicious, in that respect,
be they given a ‘weaker’ or a ‘stronger’ reading. (One reading or another will
always have to be applied, due to the inherent vagueness of the formulations;
see Toury forthcoming.)
If such a proposition is understood as a claim for exclusiveness –for
instance, if translation involves explicitation is taken to imply that it
is only instances of explicitation that will be encountered, to the exclusion of
non-explicitation, let alone implicitation – then the claim is obviously false.In
fact, it is not even the case that, in any individual instance of translation, more
examples of explicitation than implicitation will occur.
Some will no doubt argue, at this point, that claims of this kind should not
be taken to refer to ‘translation’ in general, but to something they would call the
‘typical’, maybe even ‘prototypical’ translation (e.g. Halverson 2000). However,
what constitutes [proto]typicality in the field of translation is far from selfevident
and therefore such a notion is not all that easy to work with. In fact, its
elucidation, should one wish to use it, would form an integral part of the very
hunt for universals rather than serving as a starting point for it. 7
By contrast, if this proposition is understood to simply state that cases
of explicitation can be found in translated texts – alongside cases of nonexplicitation
and implicitation, that is – it would simply be stating the obvious;
and I would very much doubt that, by formulating it, the requirements of
non-triviality and expansion of knowledge and understanding would have
been fulfilled. What is even worse, this ‘neutralizing’ formulation can easily
be taken to imply that the two opposites – explicitation and implicitation –