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80 Anna Mauranen
new guise? More precise understanding of whether different levels of language
are affected differently by interference is also needed. It seems, for example,
that pragmatic interference can exert a strong influence on target texts (e.g.
Mauranen 2000b).
Do we need to make a systematic distinction between (positive) transfer
and (negative) interference? In this paper the terms have been used interchangeably,
but it has been suggested (Eskola 2002, this volume) that we
might redefine interference as a neutral, descriptive term. But since a nonnegative
term already exists, would it not be preferable to continue using that?
One possibility of distinguishing the two might be to employ transfer to refer
to the exaggeration or overrepresentation of shared features between the SL
and the TL, i.e. ‘preferred choices’, or unmarked choices in both. Interference
would then be reserved for deviation from TL norms towards the SL norm, i.e.
‘dispreferred features’ in the TL. Examples of the latter would be collocations
or other combinations which break no obvious rule of the TL but are simply
not found in original texts (see, e.g. Mauranen 2000a). The distinction would
hardly become entirely clearcut, but one distinct advantage would be a clearer
formulation of hypotheses that have a bearing on universal tendencies, such
as for example the one discussed in this paper. To make further progress towards
capturing universals, we might then want to hypothesise that transfer
phenomena are more widespread than interference phenomena. This would
imply that features shared by the source and the target languages would have a
proportionally stronger representation in translated texts than originals, while
the same would not be true of features where the two languages differ.
The test for cultural dominance affecting acceptability failed to produce
the expected outcome. A number of alternative explanations spring to mind:
Finnish may already be influenced by English, therefore the smaller distance;
or established older translation traditions from Russian may influence present
practices. To begin to find answers, we need to delve deep into social and
historical contexts of translation, possibly into historical translation corpora.
References
Baker, Mona (1993). Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies – Implications and
Applications. In M. Baker, G. Francis, & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and Technology.
In Honour of John Sinclair (pp. 233–250). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cook, Vivian (2003a). Effects of the Second Language on the First. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters