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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
54 Silvia Bernardini and Federico Zanettin things, the choice of texts to be translated (Even-Zohar 2000 [1978/1990]; Vanderauwera 1985): Dutch fiction is chosen for translation either in the function of assumed target taste or in that of the status the work has acquired at the source pole, often as a combination of the two. (Vanderauwera 1985:132) In our experience of corpus construction, this issue has been of central importance in assessing the comparability of different corpora. 3. Issues in translation corpus design and construction: the CEXI example CEXI is an English-Italian Translational Corpus being developed at the School for Interpreters and Translators, University of Bologna at Forlì. The aim of the project is to arrive at a bi-directional and parallel corpus of approximately four million words of contemporary texts in two languages, XML-tagged following the TEI guidelines (Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard 2001), aligned and accessible online (see Zanettin 2000, 2002). Following projects like the ENPC for Norwegian, Compara for Portuguese, and the Chemnitz corpus for German, CEXI is restricted to what is probably the most prototypical (and most easily samplable) form of translation, i.e. printed books. Altogether 624 titles (half translated from English into Italian, the other half translated from Italian into English) were randomly selected from the Unesco Index Translationum database (1998), half of them fiction (roughly corresponding to the Universal Decimal Classification category of Literature/Children’s Literature as assigned within the Index Translationum) and half non-fiction (divided into nine subcategories following the Index/UDC criteria). After removing titles which were repeated, outside our time frame, impossible to locate etc., requests for permission were made to the copyright owners. 3.1 Preliminary norms 1: non-fiction While trying to set up a sampling frame for the non-fiction component of the corpus, it became clear that, in the Index Translationum at least, a different “weight” is associated with the different genres in each direction (on this point see also Mauranen 2001). The numbers of texts translated from Italian into English and from English into Italian in each of the UDC subdomains are not comparable (Zanettin 2002). The following table summarizes these differences:
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Translation Universals
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Translation Universals Do they exis
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Table of contents Introduction 1 I.
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Introduction The search for univers
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Page 14 and 15: Introduction 7 of several frequent
Page 16 and 17: Introduction 9 For many, the term u
Page 18: Introduction 11 Toury, Gideon (1991
Page 22 and 23: Probabilistic explanations in trans
Page 40 and 41: Beyond the particular* Andrew Chest
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Page 52 and 53: Beyond the particular 45 or unclear
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Page 56: Beyond the particular 49 Schulte, R
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104 Jarmo Harri Jantunen 2.2 Lexica
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106 Jarmo Harri Jantunen eighth day
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108 Jarmo Harri Jantunen second pha
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110 Jarmo Harri Jantunen Figure 2.
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112 Jarmo Harri Jantunen synonymous
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114 Jarmo Harri Jantunen items comp
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116 Jarmo Harri Jantunen Table 4. T
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118 Jarmo Harri Jantunen translatio
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120 Jarmo Harri Jantunen Table 7. T
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122 Jarmo Harri Jantunen However, t
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124 Jarmo Harri Jantunen 13. The bo
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126 Jarmo Harri Jantunen Mauranen,
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Translation-specific lexicogrammar?
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144 Vilma Pápai It is in the last
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146 Vilma Pápai Table 1. Summary o
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148 Vilma Pápai (Sinclair 1991:13-
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150 Vilma Pápai Table 2. Summary o
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152 Vilma Pápai 4.1.2 Shifts on th
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154 Vilma Pápai part of speech and
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156 Vilma Pápai his former prison
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158 Vilma Pápai Table 4. Frequency
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160 Vilma Pápai In addition, consi
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162 Vilma Pápai PA Porter, A. 1997
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164 Vilma Pápai Ishikawa, Luli (19
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166 Tiina Puurtinen (1996) and Bake
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168 Tiina Puurtinen (1) Hän katsoi
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170 Tiina Puurtinen conditional: jo
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172 Tiina Puurtinen Table 2. Occurr
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174 Tiina Puurtinen (5) Lisko voisi
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176 Tiina Puurtinen Mauranen, Anna
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178 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit equivale
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180 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit Table 1.
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182 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit do not t
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184 Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit Östman,
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What happens to “unique items”
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“Unique items” in learners’ t
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The fate of “The Families of Mede
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Thefateof“TheFamiliesofMedellín
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Author index A Adab 1 Aijmer 131 Al
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Author index 217 Schäffner 1, 38,
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220 Subject index G generalization
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In the BENJAMINS TRANSLATION LIBRAR
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47. SAWYER, David B.: Fundamental A
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