Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

72 Anna Mauranen
the target language norm, or what could be called a translation error in one
sense, and the other is text which is indistinguishable in a normal reading
from an original target language text, but in principle can be traced back to
transfer from the ST, for instance through large-scale frequency differences
(see, e.g. Gellerstam 1996; Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996). For normative purposes,
theclineneedstobebrokenupsomewhere,andalinedrawnatsomepoint
where acceptable transfer is distinguished from unacceptable. Where to draw
it is outside my present scope, but inevitably the question arises: perceived as
negative by whom? Is it only normative translation specialists who determine
what is negative and what is positive transfer as so often seems to be the case in
the literature?
A more principled solution comes from Toury, who suggests that the
acceptability is determined by social acceptance in the culture. He specifies this
as a subcomponent of his law of interference as follows:
tolerance of interference – and hence the endurance of its manifestations –
tend to increase when translation is carried out from ‘major’ or highly prestigious
language/culture, especially if the target language/culture is ‘minor’,
‘weak’, in any other sense[.] (Toury 1995:278)
On the basis of this, we would expect a difference for example in Finnish
translations between English and Russian source languages. Presumably, and
I think this is undeniable in present-day Finland, and has been for at least
the decade that our corpus covers (the Corpus of Translated Finnish, CTF,
see Section 4 below), that the English-speaking, Anglo-American culture is
more dominant and generally more highly valued than the Russian culture.
Therefore, if Toury’s suggestion is right, Russian SL translations should deviate
less from original Finnish than English SL translations because there should be
a greater tolerance in the culture for English than Russian interference.
For testing this hypothesis, as well as the status of interference in relation
to universality, I turn to the Corpus of Translated Finnish.
4. The Corpus of Translated Finnish
The Corpus of Translated Finnish (CTF) was compiled at the Savonlinna
School of Translation Studies 1997–2000 in my research group (Mauranen
1998a). It consists of 10 million words in all, about 4 million of which
are texts of original Finnish and the rest translations from different source
languages. The main source languages are English and Russian, and most of