The notion of translation universals has been subject to debate for a long time (Baker 1993; Chesterman 2004; Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Its status today is problematic (see House 2008), though few would dispute that differences exist between translated and non-translated texts. Much of the controversy surrounding the issue is about the term “universal”(Chesterman 2014: 86), while the line of enquiry itself still seems productive and interesting because “the quest for universals is no more than the usual search for patterns and generalizations that guides empirical research in general”(Chesterman 2014: 87). To advance translation studies as an empirical discipline, it is necessary to test existing theories with empirical methods and to suggest new models based on empirically tested (and testable) data. This process can be facilitated by conceiving studies in a replicable and rigorously transparent fashion, that is, they should enable other researchers to retrace the steps taken by the investigator, so that they can test the results in another language, genre or setting. To promote the use of statistical significance testing in our discipline, it would be useful for scholars to cite the sources where the significance tests they employ are documented, just as it is done with other tools or ideas that they use in their work. Merely stating the name of a statistical test without reference assumes that it is common knowledge, which in many disciplines of the humanities is arguably not the case.

The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the influence of editors on the translation text, which so far has not received much attention in models of translation. Studying texts before and after editing can provide great insights into the translation process, which is here defined as “the period commencing from the moment the client contacts the translator and ending when the translation reaches the addressee”(Muñoz Martín 2010: 179). Most analyses of translated language are based solely on corpora of published translations, and few attempts have been made to build a corpus of unedited translations (for an early such design, see Utka 2004). But published texts have usually undergone some kind of editing process involving various language users prior to their release. The study of manuscript translations informs current theories of translation by differentiating linguistic features that are present throughout the translation process from features whose frequency in the text was increased or decreased at the editing stage. A holistic view of the translation process, obtained by studying manuscript translations alongside their published versions, will greatly increase the accu-