English affixal negation translated into Spanish 79
Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004, Mauranen 2007). Gaspari and Bernardini (2010)
argue that translation universals might alternatively be called ‘mediation univer-
sals’, because some features of translated language are also present in non-native
learners’ language, which is a type of mediated discourse. This position is similar
to Granger’s (1996: 48) observation on the similarity between ‘translationese’ and
what she has dubbed ‘learnerese’.
The tendency to favour translations that mirror the source text structure and
phraseology, even in contexts that would promote other means to convey nega-
tion, seems to corroborate Toury’s law of general interference (1995), which makes
translated language creative and far removed in this respect from the universal
feature of normalization (or conservatism). If normalization is at work, translated
text would show a tendency to conform to patterns and practices which are typi-
cal of the target language, even to the point of exaggerating them, with the result
that we may encounter less variance in textual features in a corpus of translated
language (Xiao 2010). Our data bear witness to the opposite behaviour: there is
a tendency to transfer language structures and expressive practices that are more
frequent in the source language than in the target language. This behaviour may
be the result of the translators’ unawareness of alternative possibilities or, simply,
hurried, careless translating. In our data affixal and lexical negation, prepositional
phrase and quantifier/degree are consistently overused as an expressive solution in
translated Spanish. They contribute to creating ‘interlanguage’ target texts, that is
translations that do not quite make it linguistically as target language products.
The underuse of no + (positive) lexical item is best considered in terms of ‘sani-
tization’ (Kenny 1998: 515). Since this construction, either as a separable prefix or
as local negation, is not particularly common in native Spanish and tends to be
associated with certain registers where euphemism (no nacidos < the unborn) and
calques (non-aligned countries > países no alineados) abound, the translators show
a preference for more conventional formulations in an attempt to standardize the
expressive means of translated texts.
Clausal negation, however, seems to respond simply (if at all) to a strategy of
transfer, whereby grammatical choices reflect as closely as possible those present
in the source text.
The use of paraphrasing, particularly in –less cases, seems to point towards a
difficulty in recognizing Spanish grammatical resources to encode the same mean-
ings, which creates the need for explicitation. Paraphrasing has as its ultimate aim
to meet target reader’s expectations by improving information flow in the trans-
lated text (Pápai 2004: 144–45).
Omission (Ø) is the opposite of paraphrasing and may be explained as a par-
ticular case of simplification, as maintained by Tirkkonen-Condit (2004) for lexi-
cal items. Simplification refers to the “tendency to simplify the language used in