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Target 12:2 241–266 (2000). ©John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam Not to be reproduce

Target 12:2 241–266 (2000). ©John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam Not to be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator* Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies, UMIST Abstract: Translation studies has inherited from literary studies its preoccupation with the style of individual creative writers and from linguistics the preoccupa- tion with the style of social groups of language users. It also inherited from both disciplines the association of style with ‘original’ writing. Little or no attention has been paid so far to the possibility of describing the ‘style’ of a translator or group of translators in terms of what might be distinctive about the language they produce. This paper offers a first attempt to outline a methodological framework for investigating the question of style in literary translation — not in the tradi- tional sense of whether the style of a given author is adequately conveyed in the relevant translation but in terms of whether individual literary translators can be shown to use distinctive styles of their own. Résumé: Des études littéraires, les études de traduction ont hérité l’intérêt qu’elles portent à la créativité et au style individuel des auteurs, et de la linguistique celui qu’elles portent au style des groupes sociaux usagers de la langue. Aux deux disciplines, elles ont également emprunté l’association des notions de style et de création ‘originale’. Jusqu’à présent, peu d’attention a été accordée à la possibilité de décrire le ‘style’ d’un traducteur ou de groupes de traducteurs en fonction de ce qui peut distinguer leurs usages de la langue. Cet article constitue une première tentative pour dessiner le cadre méthodologique d’une analyse stylistique de la traduction littéraire: loin de vérifier si le traduc- teur a transposé de manière adéquate le style d’un auteur donné, il s’agit d’examiner à quel point des traducteurs littéraires individuels se servent de styles distinctifs qui leur appartiennent. 242 MONA BAKER She [Ros Schwartz] said that when someone complained to a well- known Czech author that he had changed his style, his reply was, ‘No, I’ve changed my translator.’ (The Times, 12.2.1998) Style in Translation A number of translation scholars have attempted to apply various interpreta- tions of the notion of style to the study of translation, mostly with a view to elaborating criteria for quality assessment. The best known and most explicit treatment to date is House (1977/1981, 1997). House sets out to develop a model for describing the linguistic and situational peculiarities of the source text, comparing source and translation texts, and making informed statements about the relative match of the two. These statements are meant to be evaluative, to say something about whether the translation is good, bad or indifferent. The evaluation is based on analyz- ing two sets of ‘situational dimensions’: the dimensions of language user and the dimensions of language use. The first covers geographical origin, social class, and time; the second covers medium, participation, social role relation- ship, social attitude, and province. These are all elements that figure promi- nently in many types of stylistic analyses, and indeed most of these categories are borrowed from Crystal and Davy’s Investigating English Style (1969). The definition of social attitude (under dimensions of language use) is based on the distinctions proposed by Joos (1961) between frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate styles.1 House in effect combines two of the most common interpretations of the notion of style: as variation in the level of formality, hence the borrowing of the categories from Joos, and as patterned choices across all linguistic levels.2 She does not attempt a systematic treatment of the notion of style as such, since ultimately what she aims to describe is not so much the style of the original text or author, and certainly not the style of the translation or transla- tor, but where the two texts diverge along the two dimensions of language user and language use, and only along those two dimensions. Hers then is essen- tially a checklist of features designed to allow the scholar to formulate a statement of the relative match of source and target texts and the relative success of the latter in reproducing the ‘style’ of the original. Apart from this extended study by House, there have been various attempts to use insights from both linguistic and literary studies of style to explain the choices made by specific translators or, more frequently, to 243 INVESTIGATING THE STYLE OF A LITERARY TRANSLATOR prescribe guidelines for the selection of specific translation strategies on the basis of broad stylistic categories formalized as text types or registers. This reflects the fact that the notion of style in both linguistic and literary studies has traditionally been associated with one of three things: the style of an individual writer or speaker (e.g. the style of James Joyce, or Winston Churchill), linguistic features associated with texts produced by specific groups of language users and in a specific institutional setting (e.g. the style of newspaper editorials, patents, religious sermons), or stylistic features specific to texts produced in a particular historical period (e.g. Medieval English, Renaissance French). Translation studies has specifically inherited from literary studies its preoccupation with the style of individual creative writers, but only insofar as describing the style of a writer can inform the process of translating his or her work. The most recent example is Tim Parks’ Translating Style (1998), which includes chapters on Women in Love, James Joyce, Mrs Dalloway, Samuel Beckett, etc. From linguistics, on the other hand, translation studies inherited the interest in studying the style of social groups of language users (more commonly known as register analysis), for similar reasons. The most recent example of this is Text Typology and Translation (Trosborg 1997), which continues a long tradition in translation studies of using text type classifica- tions as a shorthand for clusters of linguistic features to which the student or practitioner of translation should pay particular attention. The classifications may be based on different criteria: the context in which language is used (e.g. journal articles, radio broadcasts), subject matter (medical discourse, legal language), a combination of both (medical journal articles, law textbooks), or the nature of the message and addressor/addressee relationship (argumenta- tive discourse, the language of instructions). Whatever the basis for the various classifications, the aim is generally to provide a starting point for identifying the distinctive features of the source text in order to reproduce in the translation either those same features or the typical features associated with the same text type in the target language. It is worth pointing out that studying the style of social groups (register analysis) may be extended to studying the language shared by a group adher- ing to a certain poetics (including, in the case of translation, a certain tradition or programme in translating), in which case the possibility of any clusters of linguistic features identified being attributable to socially shared preferences for certain uses of language must be worth examining. In the study presented 244 MONA BAKER here, this particular line of investigation is not pursued. Such a study would have to involve calculating the deviation shown by individual translators against the percentage norm derived from an entire corpus of translations (and against the source text in each instance). We can then subsequently see if we can group translators showing certain manifest preferences together and sug- gest that their output in a sense realizes a certain ‘register’ or ‘sociolect’. To the best of my knowledge, Kenny (1999, in press) is the only study that attempts to pursue this line to some extent, using corpus methodology.3 Style of Translation? Translation studies then essentially inherited from both disciplines — literary studies and linguistics — the association of style with ‘original’ writing. So far there has been little or no interest in studying the style of a translator, or group of translators, or a corpus of translated material that belongs to a particular historical period. This is clearly because translation has traditionally been viewed as a derivative rather than creative activity. The implication is that a translator cannot have, indeed should not have, a style of his or her own, the translator’s task being simply to reproduce as closely as possible the style of the original. We may well want to question the feasibility of these assump- tions, given that it is as impossible to produce a stretch of language in a totally impersonal way as it is to handle an object without leaving one’s fingerprints on it. Moreover, several theorists of translation have been calling in relatively recent years for more visibility for translators, whether as a professional group or in terms of an individual translator’s presence in the text (see, in particular, Venuti 1995 and the growing literature on feminist translation strategies). And yet these calls have not been accompanied by any attempt to demonstrate that a translator does indeed leave his or her individual imprint on every text they produce. The translator’s presence in the text, or rather the uploads/s3/ towards-a-methodology-for-investigating-the-style-of-a-literary-translator.pdf