Stylistic Approaches to Translation

Jean Boase-Beier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367108403, 9780367108403
• eBook ISBN: 9781317639213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The concept of style is central to our understanding and construction of texts. But how do translators take style into account in reading the source text and in creating a target text?

This book attempts to bring some coherence to a highly interdisciplinary area of translation studies, situating different views and approaches to style within general trends in linguistics and literary criticism and assessing their place in translation studies itself. Some of the issues addressed are the link between style and meaning, the interpretation of stylistic clues in the text, the difference between literary and non-literary texts, and more practical questions about the recreation of stylistic effects. These various trends, approaches and issues are brought together in a consideration of the most recent cognitive views of style, which see it as essentially a reflection of mind.

Underlying the book is the notion that knowledge of theory can affect the way we translate. Far from being prescriptive, theories which describe what we know in a general sense can become part of what an individual translator knows, thus opening the way for greater awareness and also greater creativity in the act of translation. Throughout the discussion, the book considers how insights into the nature and importance of style might affect the actual translation of literary and non-literary texts.

1. The Role of Style in Translation

1.1 Reading and writing style in translation

The concept of style is a complex one, and there are many different views of its nature, several of which will be discussed in this chapter. But a prerequisite for any such discussion is a basic definition of the term. For this purpose, the “simplest” definition – “the perceived distinctive manner of expression” – given by Wales in her Dictionary of Stylistics (2001:371) will be perfectly adequate. As will become clear throughout the course of this book, this simple definition hides many complexities to do with what “perceived” means (whether by a reader, a critic, or a social group, for example) and what “distinctive” means, among other things. The role of style in translation is made even more complex by the fact that there are the styles of two texts, the source text and the target text, to take into account. And in each case, the style of the text can be seen in its relationship to the writer, as an expression of choice, or in its relationship to the reader, as something to be interpreted and thereby to achieve effects.

On the one hand, the translator is a reader of the source text, and so the effects of its style upon the translator need to be examined. Important issues to consider here are how style is read, how it achieves its effects upon the reader, and what its relationship to various factors in the creation of the source text is seen to be. For example, the style of the source text may be seen as “a set of choices driven by commitment to a particular point of view” and in this sense “it is style, rather than content, which embodies the meaning” (Boase-Beier 2004a:29) or provides “a direct link to the work’s basic thematic concerns and the kind of experience it attempts to convey” (Garcia &; Marco 1998:65). If this is the view held by the translator of a literary text, on the grounds that the text is by definition fictional, then s/he is likely to focus on the style of the source text as a clue to its meaning. And yet many of the approaches to reading to be discussed in Chapter 2 emphasize how meaning is constructed by the reader, and therefore, in the case of translation, by the translator. So there is no straightforward relationship between the style of the source text and what the text means. And if we assume, as do many writers on stylistics and literary pragmatics such as Verdonk (2002) that to construct meaning in reading a text, just as in any other act of communication, is to attempt a reasonable reconstruction of authorial intention, it seems clear that the author to whom such intention is imputed is a figure inferred from the text. Different translators may hold different views on these arguments, or hold no view at all. But irrespective of whatever view the translator holds and whatever arguments s/he is aware of, the relationship of author to intention and intention to meaning in the text is no more straightforward than the relationship of style to meaning.

On the other hand, the translator writes a new text in translating, and so the style of the target text is an expression of the translator’s choices. Some studies of translation consider how the style of the target text conforms to certain norms (of the genre, of the target language, or of the linguistic, literary or cultural system into which the target text fits). In the Descriptive Translation Studies of Holmes (1988) or Toury (1985, 1995), the focus is on the description of both process and product of translation, but especially upon actual translations and their relationship to the target culture. In the functionalist approach of Vermeer (1978), which sees translation as “purposeful activity” (Nord 1997), the focus is to a large extent on the target culture as a determinant in the process of translation, and so such studies have sometimes been seen as reducing the role of the translator to “a functionary of the target group” (Kohlmayer 1988:147; my translation). Other studies look for traces of the translator in the target text (e.g. Baker 2000; Millán-Varela 2004; Marco 2004; Malmkj^r 2004); Hermans (1996:42) is insistent that the translator’s presence must be posited in all translations.

Taking all this into account, we can thus consider style in translation from at least four potential viewpoints:

i) the style of the source text as an expression of its author’s choices

ii) the style of the source text in its effects on the reader (and on the translator as reader)

iii) the style of the target text as an expression of choices made by its author (who is the translator)

iv) the style of the target text in its effects on the reader.

It is important that translation studies overall should not focus on either the style of the source text to the exclusion of the target text or vice versa, nor on the author of either text to the exclusion of its reader. But different types of study will focus on different aspects. The emphasis of the discussion in this book will be on points (ii) and (iii) above: the style of the source text as perceived by the translator and how it is conveyed or changed or to what extent it is or can be preserved in translation. This is because most discussion of style in translation has been concerned with the translation process, and the process necessarily most closely involves these two factors. Assumptions made about stylistic choices in the text, (i) above, are largely seen in the light of how their effects are experienced and understood by the translator. But there is a further reason for this focus, and it has to do with the relationship between theory and practice. Stylistics, and especially cognitive stylistics, the study of how the production and, especially, understanding of style are affected by the structure of the mind, has contributed a great deal to our understanding of how texts are read and interpreted (cf. Stockwell 2002a:15). If stylistic approaches to translation are to be examined in their possible relation to practice, then it is the issue of how translators understand their source texts which will be of most immediate concern. This is not to say that the reception of the target text – (iv) above – has no influence on the outcome; the studies by Toury and Vermeer mentioned above (and see also Hermans 1999) have shown clearly that it has. But, because of its focus on style as it affects the process of translation, the perspective taken in this book is that, though facts to do with the target language, culture and (in the case of literature) the target literary system do have an important influence on the process of translation, it is through the part they play in the translator’s awareness of them, which forms part of the context of operation. Because stylistics includes, today, a broad understanding of context as what we know, there is no difficulty in potentially accommodating target text factors in a stylistic view. But it is not the main focus.

Most of the book’s main concern, then, is with the translator and the translator’s task, and encompasses the source-text author and the target-text reader to the extent that they impact upon this task.

A focus on the translator and the act of translation opens up the following question: is there a relationship between theory and practice which goes beyond a theoretical extrapolation from the description of practice? Though we can indeed use stylistic data from source text and target text to try and reconstruct the role of style in the translation process (cf. Toury 1985:18), and can consider statements from writers, readers, translators and scholars as data from which to construct an overall view of the role of style in translation, we can also argue that knowledge of theories and approaches can and should be part of a translator’s toolkit, a position also argued for by de Beaugrande (1978:7). This is not to say that a translation will (or should) be undertaken in accordance with a theoretical view. And it is certainly not to say that theory is under any obligation to offer guidelines for practice. The most we can expect, as Toury (1985:34–35) says, is that a description of process might allow us to draw tentative conclusions for practice. But I wish to suggest something at once less rigid and more profound: knowledge of possible and actual theories and views, of language, literature, translation or style, is as helpful to the translator as any other knowledge about the world in which s/he lives and operates.

1.2 Before stylistics: the spirit of a text

Strictly speaking, it does not make sense to say that approaches to translation were based on or influenced by stylistics when we are talking about approaches which were formulated before stylistics itself, as the study of language and style in texts, usually literary texts, had become a recognized and established discipline. And this has only happened fairly recently, since the 1960s according to Wales (2001:269). Views of translation before this might therefore have been influenced by concepts of style, or have focussed on style, but they could not justifiably be called “stylistic approaches” if what we mean by this description is approaches based on or involving the discipline of stylistics.

It becomes clear how and why the study of style gained in importance from around the 1960s if we consider the twin strands of literary and linguistic theory from which it developed: (i) structuralist (and subsequently early generative) linguistics and (ii) the close-reading methods of literary study. Structuralist linguistics began with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguis-tique Générale, published in 1916, a few years after his death (Saussure 1959). The influence of another structuralist, Roman Jakobson, was central to the development of stylistics. Jakobson was a founding member in 1915 of the formalist Moscow Linguistic Circle, whose members included Eichenbaum and Shklovsky (see Lemon &; Reis 1965), and in 1926 of the structuralist Prague Linguistic Circle, which included Mukařovský and Havránek (see Garvin 1964). Jakobson not only had a central role in the development of stylistics but also in the study of translation. In both Russian Formalism and the more functionally-orientated Prague Structuralism there was not the strict separation of literature and linguistics which we have tended to see in recent times (cf. Sell 1994:9). In the 1970s and 80s, functionalist theories of translation like the skopos theory of Reiß &; Vermeer (1984), which maintains that the translation process is determined by its purpose, were strongly influenced by Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism (Kohlmayer 1988:146). Structuralism was primarily a development in linguistics, concerned with identifying and classifying linguistic data in the greatest detail, but it had its parallels and influences in literary study, in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes (e.g. 1966; here 1977) and Jonathan Culler (e.g. 1975) and later in the post-structuralist theory of critics such as the later Barthes (e.g. 1976), Hillis Miller (e.g. 1982) and Derrida (e.g. 1988), who took up the structuralist arbitrariness of signifier and signified and explored the instability of meaning which results (cf. Barry 2002:65). Structuralism also led to the concentration on “literary codes and conventions” (Pilkington 2000:22) known as semiotics (e.g. Eco 1981). In the 1960s and 70s, structuralist literary approaches shared the aim of structuralist linguistics to classify and describe data; works such as Culler (1975) or Riffaterre (1970) can be regarded as early examples of stylistics proper, the study of style in language.

It is important to realize that a major change took place in linguistics with the development of generative linguistics, initially proposed by Chomsky in 1957. Sometimes translation scholars seem to have a rather inadequate understanding of the difference between structuralist linguistics and generative linguistics, but this difference is crucial. Generative linguistics arose from the conviction that classifying linguistic data in structuralist manner for individual languages and following an inductive approach to explanation, which derived underlying regularities from those data without offering explanations (other than the functional ones which appeared in later developments of structuralism), was insufficient to explain language. Generative grammar was concerned with the human mind, and how language reflected it. It proposed universal cognitive principles and aimed to explain, deductively, how the data were derived from them. This is a very basic distinction which is essential to an understanding of both developments in stylistics and much of the later discussion of linguistics in translation studies, and I would advise all readers of this book to bear it in mind. Generative grammar, like structuralist grammar before it, had a very strong influence on stylistics, especially through the work of scholars such as Freeman, whose book Linguistics and Literary Style (1970) offered examples of the stylistic study of literary texts, aiming to show how their literary effects could be explained in terms of their linguistics.

The other development I have noted as important for stylistics, (ii) above, was the text-based criticism of writers such as Richards (1924), Empson (1930), or Wimsatt (1954a). These are sometimes grouped together under the heading “New Criticism” though the term is often, and more properly, reserved for its American proponents such as Wimsatt &; Beardsley (1954; see Krieger 1956).

Though generative grammar, in its concern for the mind as a source of linguistic explanation, was very different from structuralist linguistics, both approaches have a common feature which they share with text-based literary criticism: an understanding that the formal features of language are important. In text-based criticism this was reflected in a focus on “the words on the page” of a literary text, to use a phrase made famous by I.A. Richards (1942:41) and, to a greater or lesser degree, on a separation of the actual visible, measurable features of language from such issues as history, background, and context in all but its most immediate senses. It is a common criticism (e.g. by Fowler 1975; Burton 1982:196) that both structuralist and generative linguistics ignore all surrounding detail, including questions of appropriateness in context, such as are studied in pragmatics. And it is also a common criticism of text-based literary approaches that they ignore the author’s background, and perhaps above all the reader’s background, ideology and active involvement in creating readings of texts (Birch 1989:71). To some extent this is a justified criticism: if you focus on the form of the words in a text it is indeed all too easy to forget what is outside the text. On the other hand, it is only a partial view. One of Richards’ main concerns was the psychology of writer and reader (1924). And many linguists and stylisticians worked to counteract the narrowness of earlier approaches with pragmatic studies of language and of literary texts which are concerned with the circumstances under which language is used (e.g. Sell 1991), including their historical and sociological aspects. Because such contextualized studies have existed for around thirty-five years (see e.g. Halliday &; Hasan 1976; Chapman 1973), the criticism sometimes made quite recently by translation scholars such as Venuti that “linguistics-based” (1998:21) approaches to translation define language “as a set of systematic rules autonomous from cultural and social variation” (1998:21, 29) must be understood as resulting from an inadequate knowledge of the state of play in areas bordering on their discipline, a knowledge which has not really gone beyond structuralism to take in modern linguistics or stylistics. And even if we go back to an early structuralist writer such as Jakobson, we see that his views, though indeed concerned with the form of the text, nevertheless take in such notions as the cognitive (e.g. 1959; here 2000), the cultural and the pragmatic (e.g. 1978b, 2000).

But there is another reason why one should be wary of dismissing what Venuti calls “linguistics-based” (1998:21) views of translation, and this is that those writers on translation, such as Catford (1965) or Nida (1964), who did indeed focus on its linguistic basis, also placed at least as strong an emphasis on function and use as they did on form. This means that their work was concerned with the individual and idiosyncratic in addition to the systematic and universal.

However, though we cannot equate stylistic views with linguistic views, nor linguistic with structuralist, nor structuralist with purely formalist views, the growing realization that language involves the mind and the mind is concerned with culture and context has not until recently had much effect within translation theory on views of the style of the source text. Though Snell-Hornby (1995), one of the few translation theorists to consider style in detail, is keen to show that meaning cannot simply be read off from the source text, and that therefore we need to have a sense of what the style might convey, her description tends to rely on early stylistic theories (Leech &; Short 1981) and functionalist approaches (e.g. Reiß &; Vermeer 1984), so it cannot offer an explanation for the sort of inferences a translator might make. It is only when such inferences are taken into account that an alternative to the old structuralist code-model of language can begin to be made available (e.g. Gutt 2000).

Stylistics with a stronger social orientation, such as that by Fowler (1975) or Burton (1982), has had relatively little direct effect on translation theory, though it has indirectly influenced the work of scholars such as Snell-Hornby (1995) and Malmkjær (2005). But stylistics with a cognitive element, which has taken up insights from both psychological critics such as Richards, and cognitive linguists such as Lakoff &; Turner (1989) or Langacker (1987), has recently had rather more of an impact on translation, especially in the work of scholars such as Tabakowska (1993), Gutt (2000), or Dahlgren (2000), and my own studies (e.g. 2003a, 2004a, 2004b). Because cognitive stylistics, through its concept of context as cognitive entity, involves a concern with social and cultural factors, it has been able to develop, in ways relevant to translation, what might be seen to make up what Tabakowska calls the “human factor” (1993:10) in the study of language.

Some of these approaches will be considered in more detail later but for the moment it is enough to be aware that the current development of a stylistics which aims to embrace both social and cognitive factors is still underway, and that even the more formal, limited type of stylistics which preceded it did not develop until around the middle of last century. We cannot therefore expect to be able to trace the influence of stylistics proper on translation studies until recently. This is not, though, to say that the notion of style played no role in the study of translation before there was an identifiable discipline of styli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Style in Translation
• 1. The Role of Style in Translation
• 2. Theories of Reading and Relevance
• 3. The Translator's Choices
• 4. Cognitive Stylistics and Translation
• 5. A Stylistic Approach in Practice
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index