Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

76 Anna Mauranen
After setting up the frequency bands, and excluding the proper names,
the procedure was as follows. At the first stage, the original Finnish texts’
rank ordered vocabulary was adopted as the standard for comparison, i.e.
the reference corpus. The other corpora were compared to this by noting
the deviation of each item from the standard, that is, the difference in the
item’s rank order position from the position of the same item in the standard.
The deviations occurred either upwards (the item had a higher rank in the
translation corpus than the standard), or downwards (the item’s rank was
lower), which meant that they might have cancelled each other out unless only
their eigenvalues (points of difference in the rank) were noted. The eigenvalues
were then summed for an aggregate estimate of the difference between the
reference corpus and each subcorpus at a time. The same procedure was then
applied to comparisons between translational corpora at the second stage, with
the subcorpus of mixed languages as the reference corpus.
This experimental method was developed as a tentative measure for comparing
the relative distances between corpora. It goes without saying that such
a measure remains partial because it is based on lexical rank order differences
only, but in the absence of comprehensive overall measures it can be used as
a pointer, in conjunction with other measures where possible. On account of
its exploratory character it is not well suited for existing tests of statistical significance
– even nonparametric tests which in principle might be considered,
make such assumptions about the populations which do not apply to data consisting
of a mass of running text. What we can hope from the present method
is, then, a rough outline of the degree to which corpora might differ from each
other, and expect the outline to be filled out with complementary means.
6. Findings
Applying the comparative method above to the subcorpora resulted in some
interesting, even surprising observations. What we find is that it was the
medium-frequency band (50–79), not the lowest, which actually shows the
greatest overall differences (Tables 1–4 below). However, there was some
variation. Thus, in comparison with original Finnish, the English subcorpus
is an exception: it shows a steady increase of deviations as we go down the
frequency list.
As a test of universality vs. SL specific interference, I suggested above that
if universality overrides bilingual interference, there should be little difference
between texts from mixed SLs and texts from particular SLs, but all of these