Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

When is a universal not a universal? 53
in tune with neo-Firthian linguistics and much more amenable to discovery by
means of corpus analyses.
2. Methodological issues in corpus-based DTS
Corpus-based studies of potential universals of translation behaviour have
tended to focus on the idea that translated texts as a whole are “simpler” and
more “conventional” than both their source texts and “comparable” texts originally
produced in the target language. A number of descriptive labels have been
proposed in order to account for such phenomena, such as simplification, explicitation,
normalization, repetition avoidance, levelling out, disambiguation
and standardization (e.g. Baker 1995, 1996; Schmied & Schäffler 1996; Laviosa
1998a, 1998c; Olohan & Baker 2000; Olohan 2001). 1 Electronic corpora make
quantitative analyses of these features possible and in some cases relatively
straightforward. These data may shed light on choices made unconsciously by
translators, providing the researcher with more “objective” data than can be
obtained through manual comparisons of single source and target texts.
Within corpus-based DTS, attention has focused mainly on the comparison
of translations and original texts in the same language, or “monolingual
comparable corpora”. The principle behind this approach is that comparison
of a corpus of translations with one of non-translations will highlight features
of the former, which can be explained in terms of the value added to the text
by the translation process. Investigations have used global frequency measures
such as type/token ratio and lexical density (defined as the percentage of grammatical
to lexical words, Laviosa 1998b:566), as well as measures relating to
particular lexical features and syntactic structures (e.g. Olohan 2001; Olohan
& Baker 2000).
On the methodological side, attention has been devoted to the design
of monolingual comparable corpora for translation research (see e.g. Laviosa
1997). It has been suggested that in order to eliminate possible source language
bias, corpora should include translations from different languages, and that
the corpora compared should cover “a similar domain, variety of language and
time span, and be of comparable length” (Baker 1995:234).
The question of “how comparable can comparable corpora be” has long
worried researchers, and rightly so, being key to the evaluation of validity
and to the replicability of results. One aspect that appears to have been
underestimated is the potential bias deriving from the operation of what Toury
(1995) calls “preliminary norms” – translation policies affecting, among other