The Modification of Translation Universals in Revised Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/nvts.2016.28Keywords:
editing, explicitation, implicitation, optimalisation, revision, translation universalsAbstract
The quest for possible translation universals has received considerable interest in descriptive translation studies (Laviosa 2009). However, almost all research aiming to reveal phenomena specific to translated texts seems to disregard the simple fact that their corpora – parallel or comparable – include revised translations. These texts therefore carry not only the strategies and transfer operations of their translators, but the modifications of the revisers as well. The question arises as to whether revision affects translated texts in a way that would modify their universal features, and if so, to what extent? Some of the studies dealing with the question of translation universals mention that these linguistic features mainly characterize translations of mediocre quality (Levý 1965; Tirkkonen-Condit 2004; Chesterman 2010). Therefore, it seems only logical that revisers, who aim to improve the quality of translated texts, modify these translational ‘anomalies’ as well.
This doctoral dissertation presents and discusses the results of research built on a combination of both quantitative and qualitative empirical methods. The aim of the analysis was to determine what happens to the so-called translation universals as a result of revision, i.e. if revisers modify in any way the generally observable features of translation. Based on the above, our hypothesis was that besides checking for equivalence, they perform modifications aiming to reduce the dominance of translation universals: revisers modify the explicitating and implicitating operations of translators as their overuse or absence may result in the observable presence of translation universals (e.g. redundance, lexical simplification, under-representation of unique items etc.).
The research focuses on the explicitating and implicitating operations present in both translation and revision (Robin 2013); as Toury (2004) and Pym (2008) clearly point out that explicitation and implicitation seem to be connected with the rest of the so-called universals. The analyses include the computer-based examination (type/token ratio, average word count per sentence, lexical density) of a complex revisional parallel corpus which contains the full texts of ten English novels, their draft translations and revised versions, as well as the contrastive analyses of text samples, based on Klaudy’s (1997) typology, for the identification of transfer operations and revisional modifications. The results show that revisers – apart from the correction of obvious translational and language mistakes – not only perform explicitation and implicitation independently, but also modify the transfer operations of translators. They delete unnecessary lexical and grammatical additions, reduce the syntactic redundancy and enrich vocabulary through specification – creating less redundant texts with less simplified, richer vocabulary, aiming for the optimalisation of explicitness, but at the same time even more equalizing than the drafts. It seems worthwhile to continue research into the effects of revision on translation, as some of the phenomena attributed to the translation process may in fact belong to editing procedures.