Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

2 Introduction
have no way of capturing translations from all times and all languages. Others,
again, are proposing new subtypes of universals (Chesterman 2001), questioning
or further developing already established concepts, (e.g. Toury 2001,
Klaudy 2001) or wondering if the term was felicitous after all (Baker 2001).
The discussion is very much alive, and to fuel it further, we are now rapidly
accumulating evidence from actual data which demands interpretation.
In linguistics, universals have been discussed for quite a while, and it
has become clear that a fruitful study of language universals needs to take
into account several different kinds, including important tendencies shared
by many languages, not only ‘absolute’ universals, or, as Greenberg et al.
(1966) put it in their classic ‘Memorandum concerning language universals’:
“Language universals are by their very nature summary statements about
characteristics or tendencies shared by all human speakers.” Such an extended
view – which includes tendencies – also seems to suit translation studies.
Moreover, distinctions between universals which can be traced back to general
cognitive capacities in humans, and those which relate linguistic structures
and the functional uses of languages (see, Comrie 2003) provide food for
thought for the study of translations and characteristics of translated language
as well. We may want to differentiate our search for that which is most
general first of all in cognitive translation processes, secondly, the social
and historical determinants of translation, and finally, the typical linguistic
features of translations. However, the greatest part of empirical investigation
into translation universals has so far focused on linguistic characteristics –
while theoretical discussion has concerned the plausibility, kinds and possible
determinants of universal tendencies. There is a need to clarify the issues and
also to bring together these angles, to the extent that it is possible.
Clearly, the quest for translation universals is meaningful only if the
data and methods we employ are adequate for the purpose. The value of
universals in deepening our understanding of translation lies in developing
theory and accumulating evidence from all the three main domains that
are relevant to universals: cognitive, social, and linguistic. There is therefore
no reason to subscribe to any methodological monism, even though the
impetus for systematic linguistic research of translation universals originated
in corpus studies. There are good reasons to expect corpus methods to make an
important contribution to the field in that they allow comparisons of linguistic
features on a large scale; this goes both for the more traditional approach
of comparing translations with their source texts (parallel corpora) and the
more recent discovery of the potential in comparing translations to similar
texts written originally in the target language (comparable corpora). One of