What is a unique item?

• Autores: Andrew Chesterman
• Localización: Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies: Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004 / coord. por Yves Gambier, Miriam Shlesinger, Radegundis Stolze, 2007, ISBN 978-90-272-1680-9, págs. 3-13
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • The so-called unique items hypothesis claims that translations tend to contain fewer “unique items” than comparable non-translated texts. This is proposed as a potential translation universal, or at least a general tendency. 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; it thus tends to be under-represented in translations. The concept of a unique item is not well-defined, however. Drawing on some earlier work on transfer, contrastive and error analysis, this article offers a critical analysis of the concept, and raises a number of methodological issues concerning research on the topic.