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1. Introduction
The concepts of source text and target text are central in translation studies, yet they seem to have remained undertheorized – just like the adjacent concept of the original (Baer 2017). If translation is a text for which “there is another text, in another language/culture, which has both chronological and logical priority over it” (Toury 1995/2012: 29; see also Apter 2005), it may become necessary to locate this other text – the source text (ST). If STs are not correctly identified, the comparison of translations with their assumed STs is on shaky ground (see, for example, Toury 1995/2012: 100-101; Shengyu 2018: 38) and, by consequence, so are the theories derived from such comparisons. One problem is that the ST does not necessarily equal what is commonly understood as “the original text.”
Our initial idea was to compare Otto Joutsen’s 1916 indirect Finnish translation of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869/1870)[1] with four (direct) Finnish (re)translations of the novel to see if translating indirectly really results in “a lesser degree of precision and an increasing number of deviations” (Edström 1991: 12; see also Dollerup 2000: 23) as compared with translating directly. However, the five translations are so different from each other that comparison was difficult. This observation led us to question whether these translations really were based on the same ST – even if they are all translations of the same novel. As Paloposki and Koskinen (2010: 41) put it, “categorization and labeling may be misleading” and in fact our initial categorization of the four translations as direct translations proved questionable.
As Toury (1995/2012: 94) points out, “there will always be the possibility that the assumed translation under study will be found not to have been derived from a particular assumed ST after all, or not from it alone.” In fact, although “[t]he standard Western model of translation posits a kind of exclusive, binary and unidirectional relationship between source text and target text” (Delabastita 2008: 239), the reality is often more complicated (see also Meylaerts 2006). Unfortunately, the information regarding the source text(s)/language(s) of translations on title pages and bibliographies may be inaccurate, incomplete or even lacking (Toury 1995; Poupaud, Pym, et al. 2009; Paloposki and Koskinen 2010; among others),...