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have an impact on translators’ choices in actual situations, they also influence
translation laws. In a methodological sense, then, norms have explanatory
force,butitisalwaysuptotheresearchertointerpret what norms have been
applied. Norms also can be universal by nature (in contrast to individual
or otherwise local norms), but we should not confuse them with inherent
universal tendencies (laws).
It must be something in the nature and process of translation that causes
translation laws. This ‘something’ is still quite vague in translation studies as
we do not know exactly what it might be. I do not mean here the formalized
models and theories of the translation process designed to describe how
translators progress in their work, but rather the basic difference of the nature
of translation as a cognitive process in contrast to original writing. According
to Klaudy (1995:142) the road leading from the mind to the linguistic form
is never direct and simple even if we operate in our mother tongues; if the
thought takes its origin in another language the linguistic process is inevitably
more complex and bound by a larger number of constraints. Translation, then,
is a complex transaction and there are several factors that have an impact
onit:atleast,distinctivefeaturesofST,SLandTL,thetranslationtradition
(including norms) and also individual preferences. These are all local features.
The more global and abstract the law, the clearer the impact, so to speak,
of the nature of translation as a unique linguistic process as such and the
smaller the possible impact of the source language, text type etc. In other
words the impact of these above-mentioned factors on the process is more
obvious in local than in universal laws. Universal laws (e.g. of simplification,
explicitation and conventionality) are not necessarily absolute laws, but strong
statistical tendencies that can be observed widely (showing what translators
on the average tend to do and what they do not tend to do). So far they
have been mostly identified intuitively and by small-scale, manual analyses and
need to be examined critically. Hypotheses about universals can be verified
only if we get results on the basis of several language pairs (preferably also
other languages than Indo-European) and different kinds of linguistic elements
(lexical, syntactic, textual, stylistic). Studying translation universals is like
trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. Every piece of information about the use
of any single pattern is part of the whole when we try to find out what
translations are really like. In addition, every individual study also provides
valuable information about a specific text type and language pair, and about
typicalities that operate in translation at the local level.