ABSTRACT
The search for possible translation universals using corpus linguistic methodology gained a particular impetus from Baker’s presentation of the Translation Universals Hypothesis in 1993 (Baker 1993). Baker suggested using large corpora to study the linguistic nature of translations, either by contrasting them with their source texts or to un-translated target-language texts (Mauranen and Kujamäki 2004: 1). In her seminal article, she defined six “features which typically occur in translated text rather than in original utterances and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic systems” (Baker 1993: 243). These features were hypotheses presented by other scholars based on small-scale, manually conducted comparative studies, and Baker proposed using corpus-based methods to empirically investigate whether these represented translation universals or not (Baker 1993: 247). Among the features listed are the following: a tendency towards explicitation (spelling out or adding information) (Blum-Kulka 1986; Toury 1991), avoidance of repetition (Shlesinger 1991; Toury 1991), and disambiguation and simplification (Blum-Kulka and Levenston 1983; Vanderauwera 1985).
