The article presents an analysis of renderings of the Swedish –s passive voice construction in a sample of multiple non-professional Polish translations of the same non-literary Swedish text, with a view to verify the validity of the thesis that translators resort to the minimax strategy while translating, as well as it discusses the possible correlation of this strategy with the development of characteristic features of the language of translation, the so-called “third code”. The article is structured as follows: Firstly, it presents the origin of the notion of the minimax strategy in translation studies and discusses it in reference to the psychology of translation. What follows is a brief description of the “third code” and its characteristic features. The subsequent part offers a discussion of the passive voice structures in Swedish and Polish as well as the semantically akin Polish constructions that may potentially be used to render the Swedish –s passive conceptualisations. Subsequently, the collected data are examined to answer the research questions. The article concludes with suggestions for further research on the “third code” and translation universals with reference to the minimax strategy.

This article first surveys the current, somewhat unproductive state of research into potential universals of translation. Then it considers in specific the “first translational response universal” (Malmkjær 2011), suggesting that it may be rooted in the cognitive mechanism of priming. Empirical evidence for this is next sought in the analysis of a set of 34 novice translations of the same short passage from Swedish into Polish, which are shown to exhibit the effects of priming to a considerable extent. Overall, the objective is to illustrate a possible way of investigating postulated translation universals: first identifying a cluster of cognitive mechanisms to motivate the universal, then determining the linguistic structures that are concrete manifestations of such mechanisms in languages meeting in translation. The proposed research procedure thus proceeds from a cognitive process to a detailed language structure, allowing for the examination of phenomena observed in the “third code” on the supra-cultural level.