Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Probabilistic explanations in translation studies 25
will be cognitive, others linguistic (or cross-linguistic, or textual), others
communicational, still others – socio-cultural; and there may well be further
sources of possible variables.
It stands to reason that probabilistic reasoning and deterministic propositions
would not concur: the one normally doesn’t tolerate the other. In fact,
there is probably no single variable affecting translation which cannot be enhanced,
mitigated, maybe even offset by the presence of another. This problem
is compounded by the fact that, in actual reality, there will always be more than
just two variables influencing each other and translation behavior as a whole.
After all, a translator is male or female, older or younger, more or less experienced,
more or less tired, under greater or lesser time-pressure, translating
into a strong(er) or weak(er) language of his or hers, well- or less-well paid,
belonging to a more or less tolerant society, and so on and so forth, all at once,
not one at a time; a tangled knot which will have to somehow be unraveled, at
least for methodological purposes, and its different constituents put in some
hierarchical order: more and less potent, more and less translation-specific,
and the like.
Rather than being deterministic (i.e., having a format such as “if a then b”),
the format most befitting our kind of probabilistic thinking is conditioned (see
next Section). In principle, a reasonable ultimate goal for Translation Studies
could well be to construct a system of interconnected, mutually conditioning
statements, but it is certainly premature to say what such a system might look
like. At this point, we don’t have so much as an exhaustive list of possible
variables, not even a speculative, untested one. We cannot even be sure that
all relevant variables have already been discovered. Even less can we say
with any amount of certainty what variables are stronger and weaker vis-àvis
translational behavior (in themselves, so to speak), how the members of
different pairs of variables, especially those coming from different sources, act
upon each other and what the results of that interaction are, or how one would
move on from pairs to a more realistic network of variables and its influence on
translational behavior.
6. The format of a conditioned statement in translation studies
Since nothing can be accounted for unless we have a language for it, it
would not be odd if we asked again what format a conditioned statement in
Translation Studies is likely to have.