Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Beyond the particular 39
Contribution: awareness of ethical issues. Another contribution worth mentioning
is the way in which critics such as Berman foreground issues concerning
ethnocentrism and more generally the representation of the Other. This
helps us to see the wider philosophical context in which translation takes place,
and has fuelled quite a bit of later research on translation ethics (see the special
issue of The Translator 7 (1), 2001).
4. The descriptive route
The third route away from the particular is represented by recent corpus-based
work on what some call translation universals. One of the origins of such work
has been Frawley’s notion (1984) of translations as constituting a third code,
distinct from the source-language and target-language codes. Another origin
has been hypotheses like that of Blum-Kulka (1986) on explicitation, and yet
another has been Toury’s (1995) proposals about translation laws. We should
also mention the background of work in linguistics on language universals, and
in sociolinguistics on language variation.
Progress along this descriptive route seems to be moving along two roads
simultaneously: the high road and the low road. On the high road, we find
claims that indeed purport to cover all translations, and so they can fairly be
said to be claims about universal features. These claims fall into two classes,
corresponding to the two contrastive textlinguistic relations that form the
core of linguistic research on translation: the equivalence relation with the
source text, and the relation of textual fit with comparable non-translated
texts in the target language. In other words, use is made of two different
reference corpora. Some hypotheses claim to capture universal differences
between translations and their source texts, i.e. characteristics of the way
in which translators process the source text; I call these S-universals (S for
source). Others make claims about universal differences between translations
and comparable non-translated texts, i.e. characteristics of the way translators
use the target language; I call these T-universals (T for target). T-universals are
the descriptive equivalent to the criticisms of unnaturalness, of translationese,
made in the pejorative approach.
Below are some examples of both types of proposed universals. Note that
these claims are hypotheses only; some have been corroborated more than
others, and some tests have produced contrary evidence, so in most cases the
jury is still out.