ABSTRACT
Universals have a long and venerable tradition in the philosophy of language. Here universals have been equated with those features of language that are part of a human being's genetic endowment. Medieval speculative grammarians and Renaissance Port Royal grammarians had already assumed that there exists only one grammar - the grammar of the human mind. Recent interest in universals was rekindled in the Western world in the early 1960s, culminating in the famous volume by Joseph Greenberg on 'universals of language' in 1963, where linguists, anthropologists and psychologists mapped out generalizations about language, of a phonological, morpho-grammatical and semantic kind. Various so-called translation universals as universal tendencies of the translation process, laws of translation and norms of translation have been suggested in the literature by Blum-Kulka, Baker, Laviosa-Braithwaite and Toury. The sum of the findings of the project 'Covert translation' essentially disconfirms the claim of the universality of underrepresentation in translation of features unique to the target language.
