Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

58 Silvia Bernardini and Federico Zanettin
– Savinio, The childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare
– Tabucchi, Declares Pereira
– Tarchetti, Passion
– Tarchetti, Fantastic tales
– Troiano,Jerome
The source texts of some of these translations are very old: in several cases
more than a century elapsed between the creation of the ST and the creation of
the TT. Others have a somewhat doubtful status, for instance Troiano’s Jerome,
a book about translation, written by the founder and managing director of a
translation agency, and translated into six languages to celebrate the twentieth
anniversary of that agency. Four out of the ten texts have been translated by
Lawrence Venuti, whose involvement with translation studies and ideas on the
role of the translator (see e.g. Venuti 1998) may be a further source of bias.
It would not be impossible to envisage a comparable corpus of original
texts which matched TEC in these respects. However, even in this case we would
not have solved all our problems, since we would have to ask what the effects of
this design decision might be. If we correct this “translation bias”, which has to
do with socio-cultural “preliminary” norms concerning what gets translated
and why, are we then not potentially altering the picture to better suit our
expectations? By restricting the choice of texts to include only those that are
comparable we may be obscuring important situational differences between
translated and original texts.
Let us consider what happens when the non-translated component is
added to the Translational English Corpus, giving birth to the English Comparable
Corpus. This component (non-TEC) is taken from the BNC. As such, it is
made up of texts originally written in English and published between 1960 and
1993 (probably between 1975 and 1993, see Burnard 1995 for details). TEC-
It, however, contains texts originally written in Italian and published between
1866 and 1994, translated into English in the late 1980s and 1990s. The underlying
assumption here is that the date of original production of a text in
language A does not affect the comparability of its translation into language B
with an original in language B. Whilst this assumption may well prove correct,
we would suggest it seems intuitively questionable, and in need of empirical
verification.
A second point we wish to raise relates to the prestige of the works included
in the two corpora. As we have seen, the texts that normally get translated
from Italian into English (and that are hence more likely to make their way
into TEC and similar corpora) tend to be very prestigious, canonical works in