By Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK

 

Roman Jakobson, writing in 1959 in his famous paper ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, maintains that where the style of a text is particularly important, translation in the strict sense must give way to ‘creative transposition’ (2000: 239). What sort of transposition is possible, how creative it can be, how translation does justice to the style and the messages it conveys – these are questions which occupied translators and translation scholars long before Jakobson made his observation and have continued to do so since. And yet approaches and insights from stylistics have had surprisingly little effect on the developing discipline of translation studies. In the 1960s, linguistic studies of translation such as Nida (1964) and Catford (1965), concerned to explain how meaning survived the transposition from language to language, paid relatively little attention to matters of style, and in the subsequent rapid development of translation studies as a discipline, which many scholars (e.g. Gentzler, 1993 and Munday, 2001) would date from the early 1980s, this situation did not substantially change. Susan Bassnett’s influential introduction appeared in 1980 and it was at this time that James Holmes was presenting papers (later collected as Holmes, 1988) in which he explicitly defined and described the emerging discipline. But stylistics continued to play a fairly minor role in these

developments.

 

Conversely, insights from translation studies have rarely been brought to bear on stylistics. In part, this lack of interaction may well result from the position of stylistics at English-speaking universities, where it is often part of English studies. It tends, for this reason, to be monolingual in orientation. Also, and perhaps more importantly, it may result from the fact that translation studies since Holmes have often resisted concentration on the textual or linguistic, in an attempt to avoid the perceived narrowness of those early linguistic studies of the 1960s. For however important these studies were, there is no doubt that recent translation scholars (e.g. Venuti, 1998: 1) have viewed them with suspicion. Instead, the study of translation in the last 25 years has tended to take its inspiration from literary studies, and specifically from a literary studies which, influenced by poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking, stresses notions of culture, instability, relativity and the shaping power of language and ideology. Combining this emphasis with a concern for translation ethics, much interesting recent work has focused on cultural aspects, or on postcolonial or feminist modes of translation. Catherine Claire Thomson explores this development at the beginning of her article in this Special Issue.

 

This is not to say, though, that linguistics has been entirely absent from the recent study of translation. Nida, in fact, has continued to publish in the field (e.g. 1997), and other studies (especially those carried out at UMIST by Mona Baker and others: see for example Baker [2000]) have concentrated on what corpora of translated texts can tell us. In an interesting study in the broad area of literary pragmatics, Gutt (2000) has examined the effects of Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) relevance theory on translation. Yet Gutt’s work has not had a great deal of impact on translation studies, perhaps partly because he expresses the view that no such autonomous discipline is needed, not a view likely to be welcomed by a still developing subject. Apart from Gutt’s study, recent work in both literary pragmatics and cognitive stylistics, which examines the relationship between style and cognition (e.g. Stockwell, 2002), has failed to have any discernible effects on the study of translation.

 

This Special Issue aims to redress the balance a little, by concentrating specifically on issues of style and translation. The topics considered in these articles fall roughly into six main areas:

 

1. the style of the source text and how it can be conveyed by a translator (all five articles consider this issue);

 

2. the notion of style as choice and how this affects translation (Malmkjær, Boase-Beier, Millán-Varela);

 

3. the style of a group as opposed to the style of an individual writer (Thomson, Marco);

 

4. the voice of the translator in the translated text (all five discuss this to varying extents);

 

5. the need for a special stylistics of translated texts to account for their relationship to a source text (Malmkjær, Millán-Varela, Thomson);

 

6. the role of cognitive notions such as inferred translator, implied author and state of mind in the study of translation (Malmkjær, Boase-Beier, Millán-Varela, Marco).

 

As this list of topics suggests, the articles in this Special Issue represent an extremely eclectic mix of views and approaches; in fact they take on literary notions such as intertextuality and reception as well as examining linguistic structures such as transitivity, word-order, ambiguity and reported speech. It is a mix all stylisticians are familiar with, and this is thus one very fundamental way in which these articles illustrate the natural affinity of the disciplines of stylistics and translation studies.

 

An important effect of their coming together in this Special Issue is to provide stylistic access to a very broad range of material. The first two articles consider translation into English: Kirsten Malmkjær’s from the Danish of Hans Christian Andersen and Jean Boase-Beier’s from the work of the modern German poet Volker von Törne. The other three articles examine translation out of English in its broadest sense, though in none of the three is it British English and in one case (Thomson) it could be argued that it is not English at all. Carmen Millán-Varela explores the relationship between James Joyce’s original and its Galician translation, Catherine Claire Thomson that between a Scots novel by Alan Warner and its Danish translation, and Josep Marco discusses issues in the Catalan translation of Henry James. It is to be hoped that this collection of articles will help to fill a gap and also provide impetus for further study at the cross-over of the two disciplines of translation studies and stylistics.

 

References

 

Baker, M. (2000) ‘Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator’, Target 12(2): 241–66.

Bassnett, S. (1980) Translation Studies. London: Methuen.

Catford, J. (1965) A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gentzler, E. (1993) Contemporary Translation Theories. London: Routledge.

Gutt, E.-A. (2000) Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Manchester: St Jerome Press.

Holmes, J. (1988) Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam:

Rodopi.

Jakobson, R. (2000) ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in R Brower (ed.) On Translation, pp.

232–9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Munday, J. (2001) Introducing Translation Studies. London: Routledge.

Nida, E. (1964) Towards a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill.

Nida, E. (1997) ‘Theories of Translation’, Journal of Translation Studies 1: 102–8.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Stockwell, P. (2002) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation. London: Routledge.

Address

Jean Boase-Beier, School of Language, Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. [email: j.boase-beier@uea.ac.uk]