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Untypical frequencies in translated language
A corpus-based study on a literary corpus
of translated and non-translated Finnish
Sari Eskola
University of Joensuu
The theoretical goal of this paper is to clarify some central concepts
frequently used in corpus-based translation studies. When we are primarily
interested in uncovering the essence of translation per se,weshouldnotmake
a distinction between norm-dependent and potential universal features but
rather talk about laws of translation more widely (as both local and global
inherent tendencies and regularities pertaining to translation). The empirical
goal is to outline some results concerning dissimilarities in the frequencies
and distributions of three non-finite structures of the Finnish language
(referative, final and temporal constructions) in different language variants:
texts originally produced in Finnish and texts translated from English and
Russian into Finnish. I provide evidence in support of a possible universal
law that translations tend to under-represent target-language-specific, unique
linguistic features and over-represent features that have straightforward
translation equivalents (functioning as some kind of stimuli) in the source
language. It is a question of interference but not in a negative, but rather a
neutral, abstract and statistical sense.
1. Introduction
There has been a gradual shift from prescriptiveness in translation studies
towards understanding that translations inevitably form a language variant
of their own: they tend (and are also allowed) to possess properties that
differ from those of texts that have originally been produced in the same
language (translations are “different”, not “deviant” as Baker 1999:292 puts it).
Translated texts have been referred to as “the third code” (Frawley 1984), “the
third language” (Duff 1981) and “hybrid language” (Trosborg 2000). However,