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Corpora, universals and interference 79
is likely to remain low. In statistical terms, however, the impact of unequal
corpus size is much reduced by the fact that the comparisons are based on the
rank order differences, not direct frequencies. The result is intriguing because
itrunscountertoToury’sperfectlyreasonable assumption. It calls for further
research and new explanations.
7. Conclusion
It has been argued in this paper that in order to explore the plausibility of
interference constituting a fundamental law of translation, or a translation
universal, it is necessary to have access to different kinds of comparable
corpora: original texts in the target language, and translations with different
source languages. The findings based on such comparable corpora indicated
that translated texts deviated clearly from the original, untranslated texts,
and on the whole, translations bore a closer affinity to each other than to
untranslated texts. At the same time, different source languages, Russian and
English, showed individual profiles of deviation. The results suggest that the
source language is influential in shaping translations, but it cannot be the
sole cause, because the translations resembled each other. The study therefore
lends support to Toury’s (1995) claim that interference or transfer constitutes a
general law of translation. It also supports Baker’s (1993) hypothesis insofar as
the bilingual interference between particular language pairs does not seem to
exhaust the differential between translations and non-translations. To reconcile
the two hypotheses we simply need to recognise that the general tendency
of source language influence on translations is an abstraction based on a
number of language pairs showing the same trend; whereas the influence of
a particular source language (or indeed source text, as is also often assumed)
on a particular target language is not sufficient to account for the differences
between translated and untranslated texts. Therefore, interference (or transfer)
is best conceptualised as one of the universal tendencies, on a high level of
abstraction, precisely on account of predictably taking place in each language
pair involved in translation.
The general-level comparison carried out in this study cannot pinpoint
individual occurrences of interference. Intriguing research questions therefore
remain: is transfer universal because it involves bilingual processing and therefore
an inescapable contact between two language systems, a consequence of
the ‘multicompetence’ (Cook 2003b) of a multilingual individual? Or is it triggered
off by the source text, and the translator’s task of rendering that text in a