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.
2013. The Significance of Hypotheses. TTR 24:2 ► pp. 65 ff.
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Jean Nitzke & Silke Gutermuth
2021. An Intralingual Parallel Corpus of Translations into German Easy Language (Geasy Corpus): What Sentence Alignments Can Tell Us About Translation Strategies in Intralingual Translation. In New Perspectives on Corpus Translation Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 281 ff.
Hansen‐Schirra, Silvia
2017. EEG and Universal Language Processing in Translation. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, ► pp. 232 ff.
Kenny, Dorothy & Mali Satthachai
2019. Explicitation, Unique Items and the Translation of English Passives in Thai Legal Texts. Meta 63:3 ► pp. 604 ff.
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