Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

74 Anna Mauranen
1. that which is culturally influential on account of its prestige value (e.g.
literary texts),
2. that which is influential by being widely consumed (e.g. popular and
entertaining genres),
3. that which is influential by getting translated to a large extent (e.g. children’s
books, user’s manuals and technical texts).
In practice the criteria were weighted also according to the interests of the
research team. In consequence, the seven genres finally included are literary
texts, academic texts, children’s fiction, popular fiction, popular non-fiction,
entertainment and biography. In practice the compilation was made with
translations at the centre, since it was easier to find comparable Finnish to
match these than the other way around. In all, these are what might be called
‘prototypical’ translations, which makes a good basis for a new field at the stage
of exploratory studies.
5. Comparing the corpora
To test the two assumptions discussed above, that transfer may be universal and
that it is more acceptable if the source culture is dominant and has high prestige
in the target culture, I chose to look at subcorpora of literature, because they
offer the widest SL selection of matching texts:
The Subcorpora
Original Finnish Fiction
1 million
Translations with Mixed Source Languages (10 languages)
1 million +
Translations with English as Source Language
1 million +
Translations with Russian as Source Language
0.6 million +
The corpora are of a fairly even size, apart from the Russian subcorpus, which
is clearly smaller, and just slightly over half the size of the others. This is
a matter extremely hard to change – the time span for Russian was already
extended backwards from the others (to the beginning of 1990s) to be able to