Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

68 Anna Mauranen
A general assumption seems to be that transfer is a relation between texts,
that is, it occurs as influence from one text to another (e.g. Toury 1995). Even
if it may also acquire systemic characteristics, these presumably take place
where Toury’s law of growing standardisation would apply, that is, at the TL
end. Thus, to put it in Toury’s terms, we replace (ST) textemes with (TL)
repertoremes, but not vice versa.
However, we might question this assumption and posit instead that the
source text activates the source language processing system, which in turn
affects the target text production, because both the SL and the TL systems
are simultaneously activated in the brain. That is, there need not be a direct
influence at the level of text, but an indirect one from ST to SL system to TL
system to TT. Some evidence for such a possibility comes from instances where
a TT item looks like a likely candidate for transfer from the ST, but in fact
has no stimulus in the source. For example Mankkinen (1999) was looking for
anglicisms in a Finnish translation, and had picked items like ottaa aikansa (‘it
takes its time’), although the typical Finnish verb would be viedä, notottaa
(the gloss would be ‘take’ again, corresponding to a different sense of take).
On inspection it turned out that the equivalent expression was not there in
the source text; in other words, the apparent anglicism had not in fact been
triggered off by the ST. A plausible explanation would therefore be that the
bilingual processing situation activates both language systems, and that the
source language system influences processing in the target language. Linguistic
influence is, then, a normal consequence of language contact, or, part of what
Cook (2003b:2) calls ‘multicompetence’ in a bi- or multilingual individual. If
we were able to show that translation is an exception to this, that would be
highlyunexpectedbutofcourseallthemoreinteresting.
How could this be shown, then? In other words, what kind of evidence
would be needed for supporting an assumption that translations manifest
no significant traces of interference from the source language? The first way
in which this would receive support is if comparable corpora of translated
and untranslated texts were sufficiently similar to each other to warrant the
interpretation that we are talking about a single universe of texts. In statistical
terms, since corpora are always samples, the question is whether they could
have been drawn from the same population. We do not have entirely reliable
statistical measures of overall differences or similarity in corpora yet (although
for instance Kilgarriff is developing means for doing this, see Kilgarriff 2001),
and before we do, we cannot address the question directly on an empirical
basis. But I shall be exploring one possibility for such comparison a little later
on (see, Section 6 below).