Paper 21
What is a unique item?
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introducing the hypothesis
- 2.Unique with respect to what languages?
- 3.Absolutely unique?
-
4.How do we identify uniqueness?
-
5.Linguistically or perceptually unique?
- 6.Are unique items unique to translation?
- 7.Is “unique item” a good term?
- 8.Is the cart before the horse?
- 9.What’s the point?
-
Notes