ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to conduct a full empirical test of the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis (Halverson 2003, 2007, 2009, 2010) on the language pairs Norwegian-Spanish and English-Spanish. As mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 4, this hypothesis is one of three hypotheses posited on the proposed translation universal over- or under-representation of target-language specific features. Chapter 4 presented and tested the mutually exclusive – yet well attested – Over-representation of Target-Language Specific Features (Baker 1993) and the Unique Items (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004) hypotheses. The more complex Gravitational Pull Hypothesis was posited in response to this conundrum, and, from a theoretical framework in Cognitive Grammar, seeks to explain and predict the outcome of a translation situation based on cognitive processes in the bilingual’s mind.
