Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Corpora, universals and interference 73
the others (10 in all) are represented as one of two exemplars only. It is an
important corpus for the study of translation universals, because it is one of
the largest comparable corpora hitherto in existence, along with the pioneering
Translational English Corpus (TEC) at the UMIST. It is also of special interest
because the main language, Finnish, is not an Indo-European language. Most
translation studies and most corpora that are currently available are heavily
biased towards Indo-European languages, English in particular. Moreover, the
CTF has been compiled as a comparable corpus from the beginning, therefore
its compilation principles have remained consistent – to the extent that realworld
conditions allow.
The amount of translations in the corpus is larger than that of originals
because texts from different source languages can be compared to the same
set of Finnish texts. The source languages are mostly Indo-European, but
include Hungarian and Estonian, which, like Finnish, belong to the Finno-
Ugric family. Issues of typological influence can therefore be studied with
this data. The corpus contains whole texts, not extracts. The selection criteria
were genre-based, or perhaps more precisely, domain-based, since the genres
chosen are more appropriately described as genre clusters rather than basiclevel
genres (see, for example Mauranen 1998b), and the criteria remained
external all through. Resorting to external criteria implied making use of
publishers’ and libraries’ classification systems. This means fundamentally
relying on a classification that is prevalent and generally accepted in the culture;
we could also call this a set of ‘folk genres’. Internal, or linguistic, criteria were
deliberately avoided, because this would have meant selecting the data by the
same criteria that would be used in its investigation. This would bring along
serious problems of circularity, and although the folk genre approach may seem
somewhat rough, it does reflect culturally relevant objects and meanings.
To ensure authenticity, the translations were all published, not elicited
for the corpus. It was felt that high quality translations would be the first
priority, since it makes sense to study translation products in a form in which
they are accepted in the culture; therefore the texts came from established
publishers, and the translators were mostly professionals. With some genres
like academic texts, translators are usually experts in the field rather than
professional translators, so an exception had to be made here. Since translation
ideologies, traditions and fashions change, it was decided to opt for a narrow
time window of five years (1995–1999), even though minor adjustments had
to be made. The genres were chosen chiefly on account of their importance to
translation. Three kinds of importance were distinguished: