Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

When is a universal not a universal? 55
Table 1. Titles translated in Italy (from English) and in the United States (from Italian)
E → I (Italy 76–95) I → E (USA 77–96)
UDC category Texts % Texts %
Literature/Children’s Literature 4817 40% 502 28%
Art/Games/Sport 757 6% 343 19%
Education/Law/Social Science 1251 11% 187 11%
Applied Science 1835 16% 138 8%
History/Geography/Biography 919 8% 171 10%
Natural and Exact Science 643 6% 111 6%
Philosophy/Psychology 833 7% 53 3%
Religion/Theology 477 4% 267 15%
Generalities/Information Science 101 1% 2 0%
Total 11 633 100% 1774 100%
This table does not only indicate that translation from English into Italian
is much more frequent than from Italian into English. It also shows that
Italian non-fiction texts translated for the American market mainly belong to
the domains of art/games/sports and religion, whereas American non-fiction
texts translated into Italian have lower proportions from these domains, and a
higher one of applied science texts. 2
Now if we want our corpus to represent the operation of two different sets
of translation policies (an arguably desirable objective), we need to follow the
proportions set out above in each case, with the consequence that the various
components will not be comparable. Alternatively, we can decide to make the
corpus directional, and build it so as to represent the policies adopted in one
direction only, or even not to bother about translation policies at all, and
select texts opportunistically. Yet it would appear that in this way we miss the
opportunity to relate the extra-textual conditioning factors of the context of
situation/culture to the observation of linguistic patterning offered by corpora.
Monolingual comparable corpora (MCC) may appear to be untouched
by these problems, since they do without source texts altogether. On the
contrary, MCCs as built and used so far have involuntarily tended to obscure
these realities, allowing texts to be detached from the extra-textual constraints
(preliminary norms) that result in certain texts, writers, or genres having larger
markets for translation than others in a given place at a given time. The bidirectionality
criterion in CEXI and similar corpora, on the other hand, forces
the corpus builder to face these problems, and solve them in some way or other:
in the case of CEXI, it was decided that a common bi-directional core would
be built, and then supplemented with directional sets that could be added to