Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

88 Sari Eskola
laws. In this sense my research progresses from concrete to abstract and from
local to global. On the local level I draw conclusions about regularities of translators’
behaviour in given language pairs (English-Finnish, Russian-Finnish), a
given time span (contemporary literature) and text type (literary prose). The
aim of using two different translational subcorpora is to examine the possible
impact of the source language on translated Finnish. Results concerning features
that are found irrespective of the source languages can be used to test
hypotheses concerning universals of translation on the global level.
This paper concentrates on three non-finite syntactic structures, namely
referative (e.g. Tiedän hänen tulleen ‘I know she has come’), temporal (e.g.
Lukiessaan kirjaa ‘Reading a book’) and final (e.g. Kiirehdin ehtiäkseni junaan
‘I hurried to catch the train’) constructions. These are packed predications
which are often used to compress information. They do not include a finite
verb and could alternatively be realized by a subordinate clause: the finite and
non-finite variants cover the same information and are typically considered as
interchangeable. As there is an option available in the use of these structures
it is interesting to find out differences in patterns of choice in their use
in translated and non-translated texts. Compared to many Indo-European
languages, the Finnish language is very synthetic and uses structures of these
kinds productively.
The starting point of my analysis is the hypothesis that translations tend to
show untypical syntactic, lexical and textual frequencies as compared to nontranslated
texts. There are some results supporting this law but they are still
quite few (e.g. Gellerstam 1996; Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996; Mauranen 2000).
The results at hand focus on untypical frequencies on the syntactic level, and a
central factor is the availability or absence of corresponding syntactic elements
in the source language. There is a clear tendency that preferences in choosing
between certain interchangeable expressions in translations are strongly associated
with the features of the source language, both in terms of the systemic
possibility and of the actual typicality of corresponding constructions. Whereas
contrastive research on the typicality of particular linguistic structures in different
languages is still largely missing and intuition is not a very good tool for
estimating it, the knowledge of differences and similarities of the systemic features
of languages is on a much firmer basis. In this sense the analysed Finnish
non-finite verb forms can be divided into the following subgroups:
a. The structure is unique and language-specific; there is no straightforward
equivalent in English and Russian that could be productively paraphrased
by a finite verb form (referative construction).