Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

30 Gideon Toury
thegaininretainingthenotionof‘universals’inTranslationStudiesisworth
the price we would be paying for it. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe future work
will make me change my mind.
Notes
* A shorter version, focusing on slightly different issues, was presented at the 3rd Congress
of EST: “Translation Studies: Claims, Changes and Challenges”, Copenhagen, August–
September 2001 (forthcoming).
1. I will however highlight possible universals by using small caps.
2. Examples of such studies would include Hans Lindquist’s account of English adverbs in
Swedish translation, on the basis of some 2000 expressions, the first 200 adverbials in each
one of ten texts (Lindquist 1984), or Uwe Kjär’s doctoral dissertation on the translation
into Swedish of German verb metaphors of the type Der Schrank seufzt, 1188 in number,
occurring in some 4,000 pages of modern German novels (Kjär 1988).
3. Actually, the first links may be missing too: there is no need to assume that words are the
lowest-level items that can be observed and submitted to study within Translation Studies,
nor that lower-level items are necessarily less interesting objects for study.
4. Incidentally, this account also highlights some of the limitations of corpus studies in
their present application to translation: it is [relatively] easy to collect in a fully automatic
way immense amounts of material on the lower levels, making the calculation of factual
frequencies quite easy and reliable. It becomes more and more complicated, and less and
less automatic, the higher one goes up the generality scale, which renders probabilities much
more difficult to assess.
5. It is therefore quite surprising that he does not apply a similar approach to translation in
the few articles he published about it (e.g. Halliday 1993a).
6. SeeNote1.
7. Thus, it is not even agreed whether prototypical translation should be ascribed to
‘professionals’ (e.g. Halverson 2000) or to ‘natural translators’ (Harris 1978), nor is there
any agreement as to what each one of them means.
8. This argument was developed in Toury 2002.
9. The notion of ‘shift’ itself will be kept intuitive. The issue of how, and in respect to what,
a shift may be discerned and/or measured is controversial and tackling it is bound to take us
way off course.
10. This statement itself may well be another candidate for universal-ship.
11. For instance, an expected phonetic change that doesn’t occur (which is always a possibility)
is often justified as an evidence of having been created at a later period, when the
law had stopped being active, or as an evidence of having been imported from without, in a
situation of language contact, or as a result of a combination of the two.