Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

44 Andrew Chesterman
embellishment. Still other scholars prefer to look for core patterns, or simply
widespread regularities.
Claims about universals are in fact examples of descriptive hypotheses –
unrestricted descriptive hypotheses, with no scope conditions. As soon as we
limit the scope of the claims to some subset of translations, we are proposing
restricted descriptive hypotheses.
When it comes to the hypotheses themselves we find a plethora of terms
that appear at first sight to mean more or less the same thing (e.g. standardization,
simplification, levelling, normalization, conventionalization). Sometimes
these are used to refer to a feature of difference between translations and their
source texts, and sometimes to a feature of difference between translations and
non-translated texts. These latter are called ‘parallel’ texts by some scholars,
‘comparable’ texts by others, and ‘original’ texts by still others. I now use ‘nontranslated’
to avoid confusion: this also gives the convenient abbreviation NT,
to go with ST and TT.
And further: some of the terms appear to be ambiguous between a process
reading (from source text to translation) and a product reading: e.g. those
ending in -tion in English. We do need to standardize our terminology here.
Problem: operationalization. Different scholars often operationalize these abstract
notions in different ways – which again makes it difficult to compare research
results. We need more replication, and this means explicit descriptions
of methodology.
Problem: causality. A final major problem has to do with causality and how
to study it. To claim that a given linguistic feature is universal is one thing.
But we would also like to know its cause or causes. Here, we can currently
do little more than speculate as rationally as possible. The immediate causes
of whatever universals there may be must be sought in human cognition –
to be precise, in the kind of cognitive processing that produces translations.
Translations arise, after all, in the minds of translators, under certain causal
constraints. One source of these constraints is the source text, or rather its
meaning or intended message. The translator is constrained by “what was said”
in the earlier text. More precisely, translators are constrained by what they
understand was said in the source text. This inevitable interpretation process
acts as a filter; and it is this filtering that seems to offer a site for the explanation
for some of the S-universals that have been claimed, such as those concerning
standardization and explicitation. Filtering involves reducing the irrelevant