Unique items hypothesis: a case study of student Russian-to-English translations

Lekomtseva Irina Alekseevna PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of English Philology and Translation, St Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya Nab., 11 rainbow5@mail.ru Other publications by this author     Kulikova Marina Nikolaevna ORCID: 0000-0003-2501-9894 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of English Language for Philology and Art, St Petersburg State Unievrsity 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, nab. 11 Universitetskaya Street kulikm@yandex.ru

Abdulmanova Adelya Khamitovna ORCID: 0000-0002-3079-0803 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of English Philology and Translation, St Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, St Petersburg, Universitetskaya Nab., 11 aahvsp@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The advent of the corpus-based approach in translation studies has shifted the focus away from the earlier preoccupation with contrastive analysis of the source texts and the target texts in the direction of contrastive analysis of the target text and non-translated, original target language texts. It raised high hopes for the search of new universals in translation, i.e. regular tendencies or recurring patterns in translations ^[1], or general laws and regularities in translated languages ^[2]. Translated language, in its turn, is generally referred to as a ‘hybrid language’ ^[3], or a ‘third code’ ^[4], or a ‘third language’ in translation ^[5], as opposed to the target language as the translated language tends to exhibit untypical lexical and grammatical patterning, that are now referred to as translationese ^[1], or translation specific lexico-grammar ^[6], i.e. features that tend to distinguish translations from original texts.

Among the new universals in terms of what distinguishes translated and non-translated texts in the target language is a unique items hypothesis ^[7]. A unique item is one that is in some sense specific to the target language and is presumably not so easily triggered by a source-language item that is formally different ^[1]. In other words, unique items are linguistic elements which lack linguistic counterparts in the source language in question ^[7]. The hypothesis claims that translations tend to contain fewer ‘unique items’ than comparable non-translated texts ^[1]. Since unique items are formally language-specific and therefore, from the cognitive perspective, not easily triggered by a source-language item, they thus tend to be under-represented in translations. As Tirkkonen-Condit S. puts it, every language has linguistic elements that are unique in the sense that they lack straightforward linguistic counterparts in other languages. These elements may be lexical, phrasal, syntactic or textual, and they need not be in any sense untranslatable; they are simply not similarly manifested (e.g. lexicalized) in other languages. Since they are not similarly manifested in the source language, it is to be expected that they do not readily suggest themselves as translation equivalents ^[7].

To identify whether a linguistic item is unique or is not unique to a target language, we need to gain cross-linguistic insights into how a particular meaning or a function is rendered in the source language and the target language. The cross-linguistic focus of our attention should be on the language use, rather than on the language system to reveal language-specific units that may be, cross-linguistically, formally different, but functionally equivalent in context ^[8].

The purpose of the paper is, then, to test unique items hypothesis in a class-room setting, i.e. by gaining an insight into whether students can propose such unique items as language choices for translation purposes. The material of the present paper is a text about course information in the Russian language to translate into the English language. The methods employed are corpus-based analysis; a contrastive functional analysis, and a retrospective analysis. The project involved 1st-year master students in translation.

Much has been said and written about contrastive analysis for translation purposes through a corpus-based approach ^{[9; 10; 11]}; translation into the second language ^[12]; universals and conceptualization in translation ^{[13; 14]}; and properties of translated languages ^{[15; 16; 17; 18]}; much less, if anything, about unique items in translation from a perspective of translation universals.

Methodology

First, we chose a specific text for our project, i.e. a text about course information in the Russian language, and chose some sentences to translate from Russian into English. Second, the text was translated by students from Russian into English. Third, we compiled original, non-translated texts in the English language matched as far as possible in terms of the text type, subject matter and communicative function to relate expressions with comparable meaning and function in the languages compared ^[8]. This small-scale corpus served as a testing ground to identify cross-linguistic correspondences, or variants, that are functionally equivalent ^[19]. The tertium comparationis, or common ground for the contrastive analysis, was the same meaning, or semantic categories expressed in the source text. As we analyzed non-translated original texts, we could find some of the unique items in the English language texts in this subject matter. Finally, we retrospectively analyzed whether student translated texts contain unique items in the English language.

Results and discussion

Bellow are the sentences we chose to translate from Russian into English:

1. Выпускники программы могут работать в государственных и международных структурах, неправительственных организациях, коммерческих компаниях и предприятиях.

2. Наряду с теоретическим обучением, значительное время уделено практическим занятиям.

3. Программа нацелена на изучение широкого круга дисциплин в области физической, экономической и политической географии.

4. Основной особенностью программы является практико-ориентированный междисциплинарный подход к обучению.

The second stage of our project involved translating these sentences into English by using all available resources, i.e. monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. As a result, we had the following translations made by 1st-year students:

1. Выпускники программы могут работать в государственных и международных структурах, неправительственных организациях, коммерческих компаниях и предприятиях / Graduates of the program can work in government and international structures, non-governmental organizations, commercial companies and enterprises.

2. Наряду с теоретическим обучением, значительное время уделено практическим занятиям / Along with theoretical training, significant time is devoted to practical training.

3. Программа нацелена на изучение широкого круга дисциплин в области физической, экономической и политической географии / The program is aimed at studying a wide range of disciplines in the field of physical, economic and political geography.

4. Основной особенностью программы является практико-ориентированный междисциплинарный подход к обучению / The main feature of the program is a practice-oriented interdisciplinary approach to learning.

The third stage of our project focused on corpus-based analysis of original non-translated English texts in this subject matter. As mentioned before, we had a small-scale corpus to identify target language-specific items, lexical, phrasal, or syntactical items, that render the same meaning and function in the non-translated English texts in this subject matter and genre. This comparable corpus was represented by the texts about course information on the website of the Oxford University.

The starting point was to identify the units of meaning that should be rendered in the target language. In this regard, it may be useful to use a semasiological approach, i.e. a semantic decomposition, or reception ^[20], to identify the units of meaning on the basis of their textual environment in the source text to further link them with functionally equivalent linguistic units found in the target language non-translated original texts in this subject matter, i.e. an onomasiological dimension, or production ^[20]. The semasiological approach resulted in identifying the following units of meaning in the four source sentences:

1. Выпускники программы; трудоустройство; названия сфер для трудоустройства; тематика текстов: описания образовательных программ; стиль: официально-деловой.

2. Связь между теорией и практикой в рамках образовательной программы; тематика текстов: описания образовательных программ; стиль: официально-деловой.

3. Суть, цель программы; широкий масштаб программы по изучаемым дисциплинам; тематика текстов: описания образовательных программ; стиль: официально-деловой.

4. Важная черта программы; практикоориентированность обучения; междисциплинарность; тематика текстов: описания образовательных программ; стиль: официально-деловой.

The onomasiological approach in the contrastive analysis of the original non-translated English texts helped identify the language items that share these semantic components. The results of the onomasiological approach are presented bellow:

1. Graduates go on to pursue careers in (clinical embryology) / Graduates have found employment in many and diverse fields including business, finance law, civil service, journalism, government and industry

2. The course emphasizes the bridges between theory and practice.

3. The degree spans such key topics as: (geography, politics etc.)

4. There is emphasis placed on practice-oriented interdisciplinary approaches within the course.

The evidence from the corpus suggests that, cross-linguistically, these functional equivalents in the languages compared can be mostly found not on the world level, rather they are multi-word lexico-grammatical items that operate within this semantic platform and perform specific functions at the pragmatic level ^[19], or, as Firth put it, ‘repeated language events’. These language items are natural, idiomatic expressions found in the non-translated original English texts that provide course information. Importantly, these linguistic, functional counterparts do not appear in the bilingual dictionaries; they are formally different from their Russian counterparts, i.e. they are unique items; and, as our experiment showed, they are not triggered as possible language choices for translation purposes; and therefore are not represented in student Russian-English translations. As we have seen, unique items are under-represented in translations, at least in student Russian-English translations, i.e. translations into the non-native language.

Conclusion

Student Russian-English translations tend to under-represent target-language-specific, unique linguistic elements and over-represent linguistic features that have straightforward language choices which are frequent in the source language. This means that a source-language stimulus presupposes the likelihood of using a corresponding construction in translation, that are not natural language choices in the target language. This implies that translation reflects source-language features in a negative way. Among the ways to solve this problem is a functional contrastive analysis of the parallel original non-translated texts in the source language and in the target language macheted in terms of the subject matter and genre. This hypothesis needs to be tested further on the basis of different kinds of texts in terms of the subject matter and genre.