Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

When is a universal not a universal? 59
the source culture. The works included in the BNC, however, were chosen to
represent the language from a perspective of reception as well as production,
and therefore include many bestsellers and widely-circulating books. Since the
descriptive information such as “perceived quality status” and “target audience
size” provided with (some of) the texts is too subjective and unreliable as a basis
for comparison (Burnard, written personal communication, 2002), it is likely
that the two sets of texts in the English Comparable Corpus are not members
of one and the same population, distinguishable only by way of reference to the
translation process undergone by one of them.
Again, this would not in itself be an insurmountable problem if corpus
users were aware of this inherent bias, and tried to factor it out when attempting
to interpret data. One suspects, for instance, that this mismatch might
be one of the causes of Olohan’s (2001) finding that “the language of TEC
may [. . .] be judged as more formal” than the corresponding non-translational
component of ECC. By examining the relevant source texts, this possibility
might be checked and refuted, making the ample evidence in favour of explicitation
as a “universal” feature of translation provided by Olohan all the
more convincing. And if one had access to another MCC in a different language,
the observation of explicitation processes in another context of situation/culture,
subject to different preliminary norms, might enable one to base
generalisations relating to laws of translation on much firmer ground.
Any feature characterizing a corpus of translations may be the result not
just of the process of translation, but of the genres of the texts and of the
influence of the source language or languages. The importance of genre and
target audience for non-fiction texts has been shown by Mauranen (2000,
2002), who compares translated and original Finnish non-fiction texts from
the academic and popular domains. As regards the role of the source language,
it is clear that
[w]hen studying translation as a product entirely in the target language
environment, we can only put forward suggestions regarding the possible
causes that may have led to certain patterns. In order to find an explanation
for our results, we would need to construct and analyse in parallel another
corpus that would include the source texts of the translational component
[. . .]. (Laviosa 1998b:565)
Summing up, if the status of a corpus of translations needs to be assessed
against a comparable corpus of originals in the same language, it also needs
to be assessed against the status of its source text in relation to a comparable
corpus of original source language texts. For instance, we can only claim