Translation and Style

Jean Boase-Beier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138616189
• eBook ISBN: 9781000651959
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Style plays a major role in the translation of literary as well as non-literary texts, and Translation and Style offers an updated survey of this highly interdisciplinary area of translation studies. Jean Boase-Beier examines a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches including stylistics, literary criticism, and narratology to investigate how we translate style.

This revised and expanded edition of the 2006 book Stylistic Approaches to Translation offers new and accessible explanations on recent developments in the field, notably in the areas of Relevance Theory and cognitive stylistics.

With many authentic examples to show how style affects translation, this book is an invaluable resource for both students and scholars working in translation studies and comparative literature.

1

THE ROLE OF STYLE IN TRANSLATION

1.1 Style in the original and translated texts

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. A prerequisite for any such discussion is a basic definition of the term. In her Dictionary of Stylistics (2011: 397), Katie Wales defines style as “the perceived distinctive manner of expression”, and this is a very good starting point. As will become clear throughout the course of this book, this simple definition hides many complexities, among other things relating to what “perceived” means (whether by a monolingual reader, a translator, a critic, a social group) and also what “distinctive” means (distinguishable from the surrounding text, from similar texts, and so on). 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.

The translator is both reader and writer. Because she or he is a reader of the source text, 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 translator, how it relates to various other factors in the source text, and what sort of reader the translator is. For example, the style of the source text might be seen as “a set of choices driven by commitment to a particular point of view” and in this sense, one could argue, “it is style, rather than content, which embodies the meaning” (Boase-Beier 2004b: 29) or which at least provides “a direct link to the work’s basic thematic concerns and the kind of experience it attempts to convey” (García and Marco 1998: 65). If such views are held by the translator of a literary text, then she or he is likely to focus on the style of the text as a clue to its meaning. And yet many views of reading discussed in Chapter 2 emphasise how meaning, rather than, or as well as, being inherent in the text, is constructed by the reader, and therefore, in the case of translation, by the translator, whom one might consider to be a particularly careful reader, likely to read with close attention to style.

Such views clearly do not see a straightforward relationship between the style of the source text and what the text is considered to mean. If we assume, as do many writers on style, such as Peter 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, then, since we do not have direct access to the actual author, the author to whom such intention is attributed must be a figure inferred from the text, perhaps with the addition of other knowledge one might have about the real author. 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 she or 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.

The translator writes a new text when 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 (DTS) of James Holmes (1988) or Gideon Toury (1980; 1985; 2012), the focus is on the description of both the process and the product of translation, but especially upon actual translations and their relationship to the target culture. In the functionalist approach initially developed by Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiβ in the 1970s and 1980s in Germany (see, for example, Reiβ 1977; Reiβ and Vermeer 2014), which sees translation as “purposeful activity” (Nord 2018), the focus is to a large extent on the target culture as a determinant in the process of translation, and such approaches have sometimes been seen as reducing the role of the translator to “a functionary of the target group” (Kohlmayer 1988: 147; my translation). As Lawrence Venuti (2012b: 187) points out, functionalist theories were developed at a time when the emphasis in literary criticism was on what we might broadly categorise as Reader-Response theories, that is, on theories based upon the idea that “the perceiver is active and not passive in the act of perception” (Selden et al. 2016: 35), and so this applies equally to the reader of a text. Venuti’s point is that the focus on the receiver of a text was not confined to Translation Studies.

Subsequent studies often focus on the target text in a different way, looking for traces of the translator in the translated text (e.g. Baker 2000; Millán-Varela 2004; Marco 2004; Malmkjær 2004), and Theo Hermans (1996: 42) states that the translator’s presence must be posited in all translations, that the translator’s “subject position” is always written into the translation (Hermans 2014: 286). If this is the case, then we must consider that elements of the style of the translated text tell us something about the choices made by the translator to express his or her own attitude to what is said in the original text and what is being said in the translation. This is a point I shall return to especially in Chapter 3.

Taking all this into account, we can thus consider style in translation from at least four potential viewpoints, which are listed in Box 1.1.

BOX 1.1 THE ROLE OF STYLE IN TRANSLATION

1. The style of the source text as an expression of its author’s choices
2. The style of the source text in its effects on its readers (and on the translator as reader)
3. The style of the target text as an expression of choices made by its author (who is the translator)
4. The style of the target text in its effects on its readers

It is important in Translation Studies that we do 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 readers. 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) in Box 1.1: 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 part of my aim is to examine how style in translation has been understood, and most works that have discussed style in relation to translation have been concerned with the translation process. This process necessarily most closely involves these two factors.

Assumptions made about stylistic choices in the source text, (i) in Box 1.1, 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 in particular cognitive stylistics – the study of how style is affected by and reflects the structure of the mind – has contributed a great deal to our understanding of how texts are read and interpreted (cf. Stockwell 2002a: 15). Whenever the role of style in translation is to be examined in its relation to practice, then it is the issue of how translators understand their source texts and write their translations which will be of most immediate concern. This is not to say that the reception of the target text – (iv) in Box 1.1 – has no influence on the translation itself and the way it is theorised; the studies by Toury and Reiβ (see page 5; and also Hermans 1999) have clearly demonstrated the importance of considering the reception of a translation. 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 and culture, its readers, 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 translation. 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.

In 2008, Jeremy Munday stated, correctly, that the style of the translated text was a “relatively neglected” area (Munday 2008: 6), though there had in fact been a few earlier studies with this focus (see, for example, Malmkjær 2004). Since then, there have been more (see, for example, Saldanha 2011; 2014; Boase-Beier 2015), and the trend has continued, often linked to studies of specific translators (see, for example, Bassnett 2018). I shall return in Sections 2.3 and 3.3 to the way considerations of the style of the target text affect translation, and our theorising of translation.

Most of the current 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? I would say that there is. Though we can indeed use stylistic data from original and translated texts 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 the other way round: that knowledge of theories and approaches can and should be part of a translator’s knowledge (see de Beaugrande 1978: 7; Boase-Beier 2015). 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 task of theories is to describe and explain. So at most we can expect that, as Toury (1985: 34–5) tentatively suggests, once we have a description of process, we might be able to offer guidance for practice. But in fact 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 she or he lives and operates. Indeed, we could argue that theory, by encouraging thinking that goes beyond the text, helps a translator to be creative (see Boase-Beier 2006b).

Translation theory, which has always described different types of textual equivalence, might help a translator to realise there will rarely be a simple equivalent: there are many choices to be made. And a theoretical notion from outside translation theory itself, such as the view that metaphor is a mental rather than a textual entity (see Lakoff and Johnson 2003), might encourage a translator to go beyond the most obvious textual aspects of a metaphor to be translated. Examples of such links between theory and practice will be discussed throughout the book. It is important to consider different views of style as they impact upon translation, and different views of translation that affect how the translation of style is perceived. We can thus try to see how a treatment of style could be integrated more closely into translation theory and, furthermore, we can consider the benefits of an understanding of style to the translator and for the practice of translation.

1.2 Style and spirit

Stylistics, as the study of style in texts, has only become a recognised and established discipline since the 1960s, according to Wales (2011: 316). Views of translation before this might therefore have been influenced by concepts of style, or have discussed style, but they could not have been influenced by practical or theoretical insights from 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 Linguistique Générale, published posthumously in 1916 by two of his students, Albert Sechehaye and Charles Bally (see de Saussure 2011). Bally wrote extensively about style in the early years of the twentieth century. Anthony Pym (2016: 1–13) describes in detail how Bally developed notions of style and stylistic choice and suggested (though did not develop) their importance for translation. The influence of another structuralist, the poet, linguist and translation scholar 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 poetics scholar Boris Eichenbaum, literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky and narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (see Lemon and Reis 1965). In 1926, Jakobson went on to help found the structuralist Prague Linguistic Circle, which included Jan Mukařovský, who wrote on poetic language and Czech verse, and Vladimír Procházka, a translator and translation scholar (see Garvin 1964). Jakobson had a central role not only 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 often seen since (see Sell 1994: 9). Translation was an important area for both groups of scholars as it helped them understand meaning and its relation to structure. Thus, the early structuralist views that influenced Stylistics were already closely tied up with questions of translation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, functionalist theories of translation like the skopos theory of Reiβ and Vermeer (2014), originally published in German in 1984, maintained that the translation process was determined by its purpose. They were strongly influenced by Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism, many of whose proponents, like the early Czech structuralist Bohuslav Havránek, were concerned with establishing the place of literary language alongside other uses of language, all of which fulfilled certain functions (see Havránek 1964; Kohlmayer 1988: 146). Though structuralism is perhaps primarily known as a development in linguistics, concerned with identifying and classifying linguistic data in great detail, it had, from the start, parallels and influences in literary study, as can be seen in early work done in the 1960s by Roland Barthes (see e.g. 1977) and Jonathan Culler (e.g. 1975) and later in the poststructuralist theory of critics such as Joseph Hillis Miller (e.g. 1982) and Jacques Derrida (e.g. 2001), who took up the structuralist arbitrariness of signifier and signified and explored the instability of meaning which results. What happens when language crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries was often an important question in works of literary structuralism and poststructuralism (see Derrida 1991: 270–6). Structuralism also led to the study of “literary codes and conventions” (Pilkington 2000: 22) known as semiotics (e.g. Eco 1981). The structuralist literary approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, which shared the aim of structuralist linguistics to classify and describe data, can be regarded as early examples of Stylistics proper, the study of style in language. The structuralist stylistician Michael Riffaterre in particular continued to write in a structuralist framework, often specifically linking style and translation (see e.g. Riffaterre 1992).

It is important to realise that a major change took place in linguistics with the development of generative linguistics, initially proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 (see Chomsky 2002). It is likely that some translation scholars have little knowledge of the distinction between structuralist linguistics and generative linguistics, but it is crucial. Generative linguistics arose from the conviction that classifying linguistic data in the structuralist manner for individual languages, and following an inductive approach to explanation, deriving underlying regularities from the data and offering only functionalist explanations (in later developments of structuralism), was insufficient to gain a full understanding of language. Generative grammar was concerned with the human mind, and how language reflected it. It proposed universal cognitive linguistic principles and aimed to explain, deductively, how the data could be derived from them. These principles have to be universal, generative grammarians maintain, or it would not be possible for children to acquire language as they do; in order for this to be possible, these universal principles must be innate (see Pinker 2015: 25–54).

The distinction between structuralist and generative linguistics is essential to an understanding of both developments in Stylistics and discussions of linguistics in Translation Studies, and I would advise all readers of this book to bear it in mind.

The adjective “universal”, and its various derivations such as “universalist” and “universalism”, can be seen to have negative connotations, especially outside of linguistics. (See Butler et al. 2011 for a discussion of some of the issues.) The danger is that whoever proposes that a principle or view is “universal” runs the risk of appearing to say “this is my view and I assume it applies to everyone”. There are many types of universalism, such as ethical, religious, cultural, functional, philosophical, linguistic, and all have the potential for such prejudices. However, the fact that an idea can be held with prejudice should not necessarily lead us to abandon it. The early generative grammarians were simply proposing that, for natural languages, there seem to be certain aspects that apply across the board. All, for example, appear to have verbs. Of course, here, too, one could argue that what we classify as a verb depends on what looks like a verb in the language we happen to speak. A good brief discussion of the role of universals in linguistics can be found in Crystal (2010: 86–7). In order to try and avoid such pitfalls and prejudices, it is important to be aware that they exist, whenever we talk about potential universal aspects of language, or style, or translation, as I shall do especially in Section 1.3.

Generative grammar, like structuralist grammar before it, had a very strong influence on Stylistics, especially through the work of scholars such as Donald Freeman, whose book Linguistics and Literary Style (Freeman 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 (see Box 1.1 (ii) on page 6), was the text-based criticism of writers such as I.A. Richards (1924), William Empson (1930), and William 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 and Monroe Beardsley (e.g. Wimsatt and 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 (1967: 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 1977; Burton 1982: 196) that both structuralist and generative linguistics ignore all surroundin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: style and translation
• 1. The role of style in translation
• 2. Reading, relevance, and communication
• 3. The translator’s choices
• 4. Translation and cognitive stylistics
• 5. Style and the practice of translation
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index