When is a universal not a universal? Some limits of current corpus-based methodologies for the investigation of translation universals"

This paper raises a number of concerns relating to the notion of universality in translation and to the methodology adopted in the search for translation "universals". The term itself, it is suggested, may be misleading if applied to corpus-based research, where the emphasis should be first on the relations between translated texts and the socio-cultural constraints under which they were produced and then on the cognitive processes underlying translation activities. The paper illustrates the working of some such constraints on corpus design. With reference to non-fiction texts, it shows how two different cultures (Italy vs the U.S.) reciprocally select for translation texts belonging to different textual typologies, resulting in the possibility of skewed distributions within comparable corpora. Similarly, with reference to fiction texts, it shows how Italian texts translated into English tend to be canonical high-brow ones, whilst this is not the case with English texts translated into Italian. We suggest that the effect of such contextual variables over translation strategies and norms should not be neglected in translation research. One suggestion in this direction is to set up corpus resources so as to allow multiple comparisons across subcorpora, such that each component can be used as a control for the mirror one.