Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Beyond the particular 43
representative of all translations. Many “universal” claims have been made
that actually seem to pertain only to literary or to Bible translation. More
fundamentally, though: since we can ever only study a subset of all translations
past and present, there is always the risk that our results will be culture-bound
rather than truly universal (Tymoczko 1998). Concepts of translation itself
are culture-bound, for a start; even prototype concepts may be, too. We can
perhaps never totally escape the limits of our own culture-boundness, even if
this might be extended e.g. to a general “Western culture”. This means that
claims of universality can perhaps never be truly universal.
In the light of these problems and reservations, it is obvious that any claim
about a translation universal can really only be an approximation. But this does
not matter, as long as scholars are aware of what they are claiming. After all,
what these corpus scholars are basically doing is seeking generalizations. We
seek generalizations that are as extensive as possible. Less-than-universal claims
can still be interesting and valuable. Any level of generalization can increase
understanding.
Problem: conceptualization and terminology. Here there is still a great deal
to be clarified. I made one proposal above, about distinguishing between S-
and T-universals. Baker’s original use (1993) of the term “universal” seems to
have to refer to T-universals, since her point of comparison is non-translated,
original texts; however, several of the examples of previous research that she
mentions are based on evidence from a comparison with source texts, and
hence concern S-universals (such as the reduction of repetition). If your corpus
does not actually contain source texts, you surely cannot study S-universals.
Other scholars have, however, used the term to apply either to S-universals
alone, or more generally to both S and T types. I think that the use of
the term “universal” itself is valid and useful, provided it is kept for claims
that are actually hypothesized to be universal, not specific to some subset of
translations.
Some scholars prefer to refer to these claims as hypotheses, such as the explicitation
hypothesis (Blum-Kulka and others) or the simplification hypothesis
(Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996), or the retranslation hypothesis. Others speak of
laws: cf. Toury’s proposed laws of interference and standardization. Chevalier
(1995) writes about “figures of translation”, comparable to rhetorical figures;
the occurrence of these figures is contrasted with translation alternatives that
are more neutral or natural or “orthonymic”, in the same way that in rhetorical
analysis one can distinguish between utterances with or without rhetorical