Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Untypical frequencies in translated language 85
In CTS the concept of norm has, alongside that of universals, become central
as one explanation for repeated patterns found in translations. Many commentators
refer to local and conditioned regularities of behaviour as norms
or norm-dependent phenomena (e.g. Kohn 1996; Baker 1993; Øverås 1998);
while norms operate in local socio-cultural contexts and change over time, universals
are globally observable tendencies and regularities of behaviour that can
be found in translations irrespective of the languages involved. With respect to
some features of translation there seems to be confusion about whether they
are norm-dependent or universal (for example explicitation, see Vanderauwera
1985; Blum-Kulka 1986; Weissbord 1992; Øverås 1998). In my view, norms are
primarily prescriptive by nature, while universals are descriptive and predictive,
and this is why we should not use these terms as alternative explanations
for regular distinguishing features of translations, and by doing so restrict the
potential of CTS unnecessarily.
It would be really important, then, to start to talk about translation laws
more widely (a very good concept put forward initially by Toury 1991 but
rather little used in translation studies in general): if we want to find out how
translations per se deviate from texts that have been originally written in the
target language and how translation as a specific process influences linguistic
behaviour, the main object of interest also locally, under particular conditions,
is not norms but rather laws of translation, features that are inherent in
translation. Consequently, I would rather make a distinction between local
and universal translation laws than talk about norms and universals as parallel
phenomena. Local laws can be found for example in a certain language pair,
text type and time span, whereas universal laws are global tendencies that
operate in all translation. The impact of the translation process may result
in statistical preferences and characteristics that are distinctive of translating
between languages A and B for instance. Rabin (1958:144–145) argues that
translators of a certain language pair may build up a kind of “translation stock”
of tried and tested strategies and this can subsequently mark such translations.
Behind such local features, there might be some universal tendencies that
operate in all translation. On similar lines Chesterman (1998) speaks about
laws that indicate what either all translators in general or some subset of them
tend to do. He also states that “the task of empirical research is then to establish
the conditions under which such laws seem to hold, and with what probability,
or under which they do not hold” (ibid. 218).
Corpus linguistic techniques can bring out observable regular patterns
in translations, and on that basis one might also want to speculate about
which norms may have influenced the features that are found. As norms