engleski

A study of translation universals in a Croatian translation of a maritime institutional text

The paper serves as a contribution to the ongoing debate on the issue of the existence of translation universals, i.e. shared features which all translations supposedly have in common regardless of the pairs of languages involved. Therefore, translation universals are first reviewed and then a study is undertaken to confirm or dispute their existence in a Croatian translation of a maritime institutional text originally written in English. The tools used in the analysis are borrowed from the field of corpus linguistics and combined with the introspective-driven research and manual analysis. We describe the texts and methods used in the analysis and discuss our results and findings from other similar research papers. Our results show that some structural features of the target language affect the translation more than the supposedly inherent procedures of the translation process itself, thus disproving some of our initial hypotheses about the potential manifestation of translation universals in the Croatian text. For instance, based on previous findings form similar research, we hypothesized that explicitation would result in Croatian translation having longer sentences and overall larger number of total words. However, the opposite turned out to be the case, i.e. the majority of sentences in the source text were longer than their translated versions, which could partly be explained by structural differences between the two languages (English being an analytic language and Croatian a synthetic one). This also exposed text length and sentence length as too superficial and unreliable criteria in assessment of explicitation. Other noticeable features or shifts, such as the use of full-form relative clauses in translating English short-form relative clauses and converting passive voice to active also raised some further questions regarding the nature and classification of translation universals. More precisely, large number of examples of translational shifts or strategies could be considered manifestations of at least two of the so-called translation universals simultaneously. Other issues concerned the fact that authors could not discern whether certain translational features were the result of the translation process itself (and therefore proper universals) or optional shifts chosen by the translator to conform to the stylistic norms of the target language. Again, these issues raised some questions regarding the definitions, terminology and unclear criteria for distinguishing translation universals, which in the end casts doubt as to whether the features investigated in this study can be considered universal at all

translation universals; simplification; explicitation; normalization; comparable texts; parallel texts

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