Translator style and universal tendencies

Traditionally there has been little interest in studying the style of individual translators or groups of translators, arguably due to the mainstream belief that translation is a derivative act and therefore translators have to reproduce as closely as possible the style of the ST rather than imposing their own style

on the TT (Baker 2000: 244).⁴ In the last decade, however, research aimed at uncovering evidence of the translator’s voice and at comparing strategies adopted by different translators has been carried out e.g. by Winters (2004, 2007) and Bosseaux (2006), who analyse, respectively, the use of loan words, code switches and speech-act report verbs in two German translations of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, and translations of the English personal pronounyou in two French versions of Virginia Woolf’sThe Waves.

As suggested by research on TUs, there are linguistic/behavioural patterns of translators which cannot be exclusively traced to conscious choices. Baker (2000: 246) thus suggests that the study of translator style should resemble forensic stylistics more than literary stylistics, i.e. it should focus on “subtle, unobtrusive linguistic habits which are largely beyond the conscious control of the writer” (or translator) rather than on conscious linguistic or translational choices. In other words, this line of investigation should attempt to identify translators’ individual fingerprints which would distinguish them from other translators, while at the same time leaving aside what can be carried over from the ST, i.e. the author’s style and SL features.

Ideally, then, it may be hypothesised that research into translator style may profitably borrow techniques commonly used for authorship attribution, where a variety of statistical methods are used to identify “stylistic discriminators, i.e. characteristics which remain approximately invariant within the works of a given author but which tend to vary from author to author” (Koppel and Schler 2003), such as average sentence length, average word length, type/token ratio, etc. This possibility was tested by Mikhailov and Villikka (2001), who analysed Russian to Finnish translations of different texts by the same translator and of the same text by different translators according to established authorship attribution indicators like vocabulary richness, frequent and favourite words (after verifying that they could indeed be used to group Russian texts produced by different authors). These measures proved ineffective for the identification of different translators, “as if translators did not have a language and a style of their own” (ibid.: 383); however, the authors found that other indicators contributed to shape a translator’s profile/identity, such as the use of modals and conjunctions, splitting or joining of sentences, or shortening or expanding of the text. Text length had also been found to be relevant by Englund Dimitrova (1994).

The idea that patterns of explicitation may be revealing with respect to translator style was tested by Kamenick´a (2008), who compared the frequency and variability of explicitation phenomena in English to Czech translations

4With the exception of some approaches which have in fact called for a higher visibility of the translator, such as Venuti (1995).

by two different translators in order to assess whether/what characteristics of explicitation behaviour are shared by different translators. Explicitation and implicitation shifts were manually identified and categorised according to the textual function involved (based on the Hallidayan distinction between ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions). She found that what differentiated the two translators was the relative frequency of explicitation vs. implicitation shifts, rather than just the frequency of explicitation: one of the translators was found to use implicitation almost as often as explicitation, while for the other explicitating shifts considerably outnumbered implicitating shifts, thus supporting the author’s hypothesis that the analysis of explicitation behaviour can give interesting insights into translator style.

Saldanha (2005, 2008) similarly suggested that differences in the use of italics and cultural borrowings accompanied by contextual information (when they are not due to constraints related to genres, cultural backgrounds or languages involved) may be indicative of translators’ stylistic preferences when it comes to explicitating information. She also argued that some tendencies may be connected to the translators’ own conceptions of their role of cultural mediators, and corroborated by the analysis of interviews with the two translators involved in her own study (Saldanha, 2008: 31).

This suggests that translational stylistics may be a research area for which the corpus methodology shows some limitations, especially if analyses are conducted on the basis of monolingual comparable corpora alone (as was also acknowledged by Baker (2000), the first scholar to perform a corpus-based study of translator style).

Some of the limitations of this methodology were brought out in Olohan’s (2004) study of contractions in the work of two translators: while the difference in raw frequencies initially suggested different stylistic preferences (ibid.: 156), further analyses based on ST author and genre in fact suggested that it was determined to a higher extent by literary genre and narrative structure (ibid.:

159-160). On the whole, MCCs do not allow researchers to distinguish stylistic features which can be attributed to the translator from features which reflect the style of the ST author, general SL preferences or the preferences of a specific subset of translators (Baker 2000: 261).

The simplest way to remedy the first two shortcomings is to compare patterns in translators’ output with patterns in the ST (ibid.: 255), thus resorting in the end to parallel corpora; according to Malmkjær, “unless this relationship is taken into consideration, many textual features of potential interest are unlikely to come to the notice of the analyst” (2004: 16). Bern-ardini (2005b) further recommends that reference corpora of both the SL and the TL should be used as benchmarks, in order to obtain information on the distance between the specific texts under examination and general SL/TL

linguistic and textual norms (ibid.: 15).

Another promising way of singling out a translator’s style is to compare their performance to other translators’, even more so if the comparison is made keeping not only the SL but also the ST constant, that is by analysing several translations of the same source text into the same TL. Such a methodology allows researchers to investigate variation as well as common patterns in translator behaviour, bringing thus ideally together what can be attributed to translational stylistics. The merits and difficulties of this option as advocated by Baker (2000: 261), but so far put into practice only to a limited extent, will be presented in the next section, as it has been the approach chosen for the present research using a MTCs.