Tirkkonen-Condit suggests that the phenomenon of under-representation in translation of features unique to the target language arises because such features are under-represented in a translator's mental lexicon while he or she is translating. Nothing in the source text is likely to trigger them. This is an excellent candidate for the status of a universal: The phenomenon receives a cognitive explanation, and similar results have been found for unrelated languages, Swedish and Danish on the one hand and Finnish on the other.

Notice that this represents a return to the idea of interference in the translation process named by Toury (1995: 274-279): 'the law of interference'. Tirkkonen-Condit's study is carried out using the methodology proposed by Baker (1993: 245?246), which may be roughly described as follows:

Take a corpus of translations into L from a large number of languages and compare it with a corpus of texts originally written in L, looking for evidence of feature F. Do this for as many Ls as possible. If it is found, for each pair of translation corpus and non-translation corpus, that evidence for F occurs more frequently in the corpus of translated text, then we will have cause to believe that it does so as a result of the translation process and not because of any relationship between any language pair. We may then be justified in calling F a translation universal.

Yet, the study contradicts Baker's understanding of a translation universal as arising from the translation process itself and, by implication, as therefore not having to do with the relationship between the languages or textual systems involved. Tirkkonen-Condit's findings depend crucially on the relationship between the languages involved. But what is extremely interesting is that her study suggests that we have been looking at the question of influence or interference from the wrong end of the pole. As Toury (1995: 275-276) points out, interference is an inherent part of the translation process? how can it not be, given that a translation is made on the basis of another text in another language? But Tirkkonen-Condit's study suggests that what determines the outcomes of this interference may be the target pole, if not alone, then as much as or more than the source pole, which we have tended to think of as the major determinant of the shape of the translation. Differences between translations into L and texts originally in L are determined as much, if not wholly, by L's unique features, rather than features of the language of the original for the translation. This, it seems to me, is among the most interesting findings to have arisen out of the search for translation universals to date. Further, it seems to me that if the concept of the universal is to retain any theoretical bite in our discipline, we would do well to reserve it for use in connection with phenomena such as this, for which it makes sense to produce a cognitively based explanation.

Many-possibly most-other candidates for universal status would be better accounted for by the norm concept, which therefore remains to do its job relatively undisturbed within Descriptive Translation Studies. It goes without saying, I think, that corpus studies are extremely well suited to the search for potential evidence for norms, though, equally obviously, they cannot be used to reveal the norms themselves.

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