Stylistic Approaches To Translation

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.

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.

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.

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration. This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.

This volume argues for an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and translation of literary style, based on a mutually supportive combination of traditional close reading and ‘distant’ reading, involving corpus-linguistic analysis and text-visualisation. The book contextualizes this approach within the broader story of the development of computer-assisted translation -- including machine translation and the use of CAT tools -- and elucidates the ways in which the approach can lead to better informed translations than those based on close reading alone. This study represents the first systematic attempt to use corpus linguistics and text-visualisation in the process of translating individual literary texts, as opposed to comparing and analysing already published originals and their translations. Using the case study of his translation into English of Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti’s 1965 novel Gracías por el Fuego, Youdale showcases how a close and distant reading approach (CDR) enhances the translator’s ability to detect and measure a variety of stylistic features, ranging from sentence length and structure to lexical richness and repetition, both in the source text and in their own draft translation, thus assisting them with the task of revision. The book reflects on the benefits and limitations of a CDR approach, its scalability and broader applicability in translation studies and related disciplines, making this key reading for translators, postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of literary translation, corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics and narratology.

This book attempts to explore style—a traditional topic—in literary translation with a corpus-based approach. A parallel corpus consisting of the English translations of modern and contemporary Chinese novels is introduced and used as the major context for the research. The style in translation is approached from perspectives of the author/the source text, the translated texts and the translator. Both the parallel model and the comparable model are employed and a multiple-complex model of comparison is proposed. The research model, both quantitative and qualitative, is duplicable within other language pairs. Apart from the basics of corpus building, readers may notice that literary texts offer an ideal context for stylistic research and a parallel corpus of literary texts may provide various observations to the style in translation. In this book, readers may find a close interaction between translation theory and practice. Tables and figures are used to help the argumentation. The book will be of interest to postgraduate students, teachers and professionals who are interested in corpus-based translation studies and stylistics.

Why did Italo Calvino decide to translate Les Fleurs bleues by Raymond Queneau? Was his translation just a way to pay a tribute to one of his models? This study looks at Calvino's translation from a literary and linguistic perspective: Calvino's I fiori blu is more than a rewriting and a creative translation, as it contributed to a revolution in his own literary language and style. Translating Queneau, Calvino discovered a new fictional voice and explored the potentialities of his native tongue, Italian. In fact Calvino's writings show a visible evolution of poetics and style that occurred rather abruptly in the mid 1960s; this sudden change has long been debated. The radical transformation of his style was affected by several factors: Calvino's new interests in linguistics, in translation theory, and in the act of translation. Translation as Stylistic Evolution analyses several passages in detail and scrutinizes quantitative data obtained by comparing digital versions of the original and Calvino's translation. The results of such assessment of Calvino's text-consistency suggest clear interpretations of the motives behind Calvino's radical and remarkable change of style that are tied to his notion of creative translation.

This book explores the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies. It shows how corpus methods can be used to compare literary texts to their translations, through the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. The comparison focuses on stylistic features related to the major themes of Heart of Darkness. By combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, Mastropierro discusses how alterations to the original's stylistic features can affect the interpretation of the themes in translation. The discussion illuminates the manipulative effects that translating can have on the reception of a text, showing how textual alterations can trigger different readings. This book advances the multidisciplinary dialogue between corpus linguistics and translation studies and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the application of corpus approaches to stylistics and translation.