Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

66 Anna Mauranen
The aspect in this definition that has begun to raise queries, particularly since
it has come up in my own empirical work as well as that of my students, is the
status of interference. Baker’s definition appears to exclude interference, but if
we turn to an earlier classic of translation universals (or ‘translation laws’ as he
calls them), Gideon Toury, we see that he in fact posits “the law of interference”
as a fundamental law of translation (Toury 1995:275):
in translation, phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text tend
to be transferred to the target text.
Interference is thus either seen as contradicting universality, as in Baker’s definition,
or alternatively a basic manifestation of universality, as in Toury’s. This
is an intriguing conflict: are we dealing with different senses of ‘universal’, different
levels or kinds of universal, or different understandings of ‘interference’?
Or possibly all of these?
Toury’s other proposed universal, the law of growing standardisation, has
under different guises received plenty of attention in the literature, while
interference has remained in the shadow, perhaps in part due to Baker’s
formulation. In this paper, I would like to discuss two things: First, what do we
understand by interference and in which ways can it be related to universals,
and second, can we extract evidence from corpora to study this (and if, so, in
which ways)?
2. Interference and its manifestations
The classic definition of interference comes from Uriel Weinreich: “those
instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in
the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one
language” (Weinreich 1953:1). In second language learning, this has been taken
to imply that an individual’s first language (L1) necessarily influences his or
her second language (L2), and an enormous amount of research has been
devoted to describing and explaining the ways in which L1 interferes with L2.
In contrast, translation studies, although more rarely referring to Weinreich,
seem to have adopted a reverse view: it is the source language (the L2, as it
were) that influences the target language (usually the translator’s L1). Recently,
some L2 acquisition scholars (papers in Cook 2003a) have been inspired by
the implications of the phrase ‘either language’ in Weinreich’s definition, and
have started looking into the ways in which second (or third, etc) languages
influence the first. This brings L2 acquisition research closer to translation