Most language transfer studies focus on the infuence that L1
may have on the comprehension and production of L2. When such
infuence inhibits L2 production, it has been often referred to as
interference or negative transfer (see Isurin 2005 among others). The
present study is a report on a pilot survey with the aim of investigating
whether cross-linguistic infuence (CLI) or language transfer occurs
when L2 is rendered into L1, i.e. to what extent L2 can infuence
production of L1. Fifteen translations from English into Bosnian /
Croatian / Serbian were examined (approx. 10500 words), done by
15 University of Zenica advanced (MA) students of English. The zero
hypothesis was that the students’foreign language (English) would
have certain infuence on native language production and create
instances of “language deviations from the norm” (see Weinreich
1966) in the students’ native language (BCS), e.g. translating
“visiting” in “The visiting Evlija Čelebi summarized (…)” as
“gostujući” (appearing within “Gostujući Evlija Čelebija sažeo
je(…)”). The primary objective has been to determine the linguistic
categories in which instances of transfer occur, borrowing the
taxonomy from Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008). The classifcation would
serve as a starting point for the analysis of translations of a larger
number of English texts, whereby it would be possible to identify
those instances of lexical items, syntactic structures, morphological
forms, etc. in the source language which are the most frequent
triggers of language transfer in the target language. The translations
can prove a fertile ground for such research. According to Hatim and
Munday (2004) “translated language in general displays specific
characteristics, known as universals of translation”, including the
“law of inter fierence – common ST lexical and syntactic patterns tend
to be copied creating unusual patterns in TT”. In order to achieve
the objective, the present study has two practical goals: the first is
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to find out which linguistic category/ies is/are most represented in
the instances of transfer, and the other is to establish the ratio of
negative transfer errors in all translation errors on the basis of a
minute inspection of two individual translations
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