The Analysis And Assessment Of Translation Style

How to translate style from one language into another is an important factor both in translation and in translation studies. Yet it is also problematic because of the difficulties involved in theory and practice of translation, therefore the studies of this issue is a relatively recent development. At least some reasons underlie this fact: no clear definition of style yet to be accepted universally, and it is very difficult to set a quantifiable standards to measure style. So the first task of this paper is to clarify what is style. 'Style' can be understood either in a broad sense or a narrow sense, and further analyzed respectively into macroscopic and microscopic styles. The former tries to explore the literary or aesthetic value of the text while the latter is mainly concerned with the linguistic choices.The demand of equivalence in translation naturally requires some measurement of style. The measurement could be of quality or of quantity. Then the question is how to measure style both in quality and quantity. We may safely assume that the stylistic study is to investigate the relation between the writer's artistic achievements and how it is achieved through language. This actually implies two criteria of relevance for the selection of stylistic features: a literary criterion and a linguistic criterion. By combining literary discrimination and linguistic discrimination, we should become alert to those particular features of style. Such salient features of style may be called stylistic markers.As for the quantitative measurement, my thesis proposes a multi-layer marker system which can be subdivided at least into 5 levels: phonological level, lexical level, syntactic level, textual level and rhetoric level. Some smaller markers are placed under the five general levels. For example, the phonological level of style can be further broken down into phonetic marker, rhyming marker and rhythm marker. Thus we arriveat a more objective method of valuing style in a translation, namely the quantitative method. To put it in details, we can work out the number of times or frequency a stylistic marker occurs in the original text, and then see how they are dealt with in the target text. How many percent of them are well retained, how many are changed into other markers, and how many are simply lost in the translation. Yet it is still impossible to reach the precision mathematics does. However, compared to the purely subjective way of judging style, this approach at least represents a key step towards the quantitative studies of style in translation. To combine with the qualitative measurements proposed in the first part of this thesis, the studies of style translation will provide a powerful weapon for the theoretical and practical studies of translation.