Baker's original formulation seems to suggest a purely cognitive source and explanation of translation universals, whereas the examples she uses to illustrate what a translation universal might be are strongly suggestive of explanation in terms of the kinds of norm that might guide translational behaviour; at most, it seems to me, the majority of these candidates for universalhood invite explanation in terms of processing ease or diachronicity, rather than in terms of innate aspects of the human cognitive apparatus.

Baker (1993: 243-245) lists as candidates for the status of translation universal explicitation, disambiguation, simplification, conventionalisation, avoidance of repetition, exaggeration of features of the target language and manifestations of the so-called 'third code'. Each of these, she says:

can be seen as a product of constraints which are inherent in the translation process itself, and this accounts for the fact that they are universal (or at least we assume they are, pending further research). They do not vary across cultures. Other features have been observed to occur consistently in certain types of translation within a particular socio-cultural and historical context. These are the product of norms of translation that represent another type of constraint on translational behaviour. (Baker, 1993: 246)

Of course, there are two senses in which the term 'translation process' can be used: It can be used to refer to the cognitive or mental process or processes that take place in the minds of translating translators, including and focusing mainly on subliminal processing; and it can be used to refer to the variably social, physical and mental (but excluding subliminal) processes in which clients, translators and a variety of implicated others consciously engage in order to produce a translation. The contrast Baker invokes with 'other features' that are culture specific and are the product of normative constraints strongly suggests the cognitive-mental-subliminal understanding of 'process' in the quotation above, as does the reference to the translation process as a causal agent hypothesised 'rather than' the confrontation of specific linguistic systems, in the description of the features as 'linked to the nature of the translation process itself rather than to the confrontation of specific linguistic systems' (Baker, 1993: 243).

It seems to me that of the candidates for universal-hood proposed by Baker (1993), listed by Chesterman (2004) and discussed by Mauranen and Kujama¨ki (2004a), very few qualify for the status of cognitively determined universals. One that does qualify, though, is identified by Tirkkonen-Condit (2004).

Tirkkonen-Condit (2004) finds that clitics and verb types unique to Finnish occur more rarely in translations into Finnish than in text originally written in Finnish. Similar findings have been reported in Lykke Jakobsen's (1986) study of (among other words) the pronoun 'man' and the discourse particle 'jo' in original writing in Danish and in translation into Danish from English, in Gellerstam's (1986) study of translationese, which compares novels translated into Swedish with novels originally written in Swedish, and in Eskola's (2004) study of non-finite constructions in Finnish.