Author’s and translator’s idiostyles: anthropocentric approach in translation studies

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УДК 81 '22:81 '25

Author's and translator's idiostyles: anthropocentric approach in translation studies

Ariupina K.V.,

Kydriavzeva N. S.

Подана стаття присвячена сучасним проблемам перекладознавства. У статті висвітлюються питання збереження ідіостилю автора та появи у перекладі рис ідіостилю перекладача.

Ключові слова: антропоцентричний підхід, ідіостиль, перекладознавство.

Данная статья посвящена современным проблемам переводоведения. В статье выясняется вопрос сохранения идиостиля автора и появления в переводе черт идиостиля переводчика.

Ключевые слова: антропоцентрический подход, идиостиль, переводо- ведение. text translation idiostyle

The article is devoted to the modern problems of translation studies. It touches upon the question of transferring the author's idiostyle and appearance of the translator's idiostyle in translation.

Key words: anthropocentric approach, idiostyle, translation studies.

Anthropocentric incepts of XVIII-XX centuries. Translation studies represent a branch of applied linguistics that investigates the process and result of translation in all its aspects. The analysis of historical linguistics and its concepts facilitates understanding and investigating foundations of translation theory and its problematic issues.

In the course of the XVIII-XX centuries the essence of language and its origin were perceived by linguists in several different ways, but among all linguistic concepts the anthropological approach to language has become the leading one. Anthropological linguistics is the most scientific personification of the anthropocentric approach, conventional, resumptive name for a number of scientific schools that differ from each other, but are united by its general interest to the problem called “man and language”. Among the linguists who investigate this problem one should name V. Humboldt [4], A. Potebnia [10], V. Vundt, H. Steinthal, E. Sapir and others. One should notice that it was V. Humboldt who made a major valuable contribution to the anthropological conception. His linguistic and philosophical cryptogram was based on his intuition that considering modern philology was not consummate, but focused on the notion of “individual” [11, p. 96]. Withal, summing up these points, one may conclude that in the course of the XVIII-XX centuries linguists deduced that language could not be considered and studied apart from the individual, and these notions are interconnected and interdependent.

The origin of anthropocentric approach in translation studies. The linguistic humanistic concepts also influenced the development of the linguistic theory of translation, as it is a field that studies translation process from a scientific point of view and includes anthropological factor in its models. The formation and development of the theory of translation were multistage and nonlinear processes. Correlations of anthropocentrism and textocentrism have always been at the center of translation studies and are still controversial and topical issues. There are many formulations of the main tasks of translation, but all divergent definitions have a common basis: the full transfer of content to the adopted language. Exactly there one may see the occurrence of anthropological factor - the notion “adopted (target) language” means an account of usual perception, usual language and its norms for people, to whom this translation is intended. In a manner typical for these concepts others began to occur; they understood the main task of translation as the transfer of content, keeping the national and cultural peculiarity of the source text, identifying author's feelings and his psychological state, style and originality of language [8].

The anthropocentric approach was historically first. It is presented in the linguistic traditions and draws linguistics nearer to psychology and philosophy [2]. As a result it has influenced the development of anthropological concepts of the theory of translation, because even in those days the main emphasis was made on the role of the population in the study of language. Undisputed and uncompromising nature of anthropocentric approaches in translation studies is based on the definition of translation equivalence formulated by E. Nida, who continued to develop the idea of anthropocentrism in translation theory of the XX century: “Translation is equivalent to the source text if it calls the identical audience reaction as the original does” [1]. The peculiarity of this definition is that it can be applied to any style of text. The anthropological factor in translation theory emphasizes also a psycholinguistic approach to the text. According to that, each individual (in our case - the translator) perceives the text depending on his own multi-faceted experience, world-view, picture of the world and so on [6, p. 65]. In this way, if the vision of the text is individual, so is its translation. One may notice that this statement has something in common with the definition of individual author's style.

The individual author's style is the way of arranging a verbal material, that reflects author's artistic vision by creating a new image of the world, peculiar only to him [9, p. 33].

Somehow each text always contains personality of its creator and contains his own vocabulary, grammar and pragmatic features. So any display of real author must be taken through the prism of the writer's consciousness. The author functioning in the work of art causes his role in design and organization of the whole text. A writer's life style and personal sensation of the world influence the esthetic transformation of his language and result in appearing of the notion of “idiostyle”. Academician V. Vynogradov mentioned that “in study of art, history of literature and linguistics it is difficult to find the term and notion connected with it which are more polysemantic, discordant, unclear, and subjectively indistinct than style and notion of style” [3, p. 7]. Such a situation is also caused by the fact that fiction language is a subject of two interconnecting scientific areas - history of literature and linguistics.

Modern researchers interpret authorЄЄs style as totality of expressive means structured in a special way. Such means are presented in text and are chosen from a number of synonyms by a subject in order to realize the communicative function in a definite sphere of activity. The choice of variants provides norms following in both a particular style and the whole literary language. Taking into account the problem mentioned, the notion of style in general includes a functional, expressive, and individual expression of communication. It is a type of information in scope of stable literary norms that provides choice of elementary structure units and their combination to achieve the communicative aim - fiction or informative.

The most frequent definition of style is one expressed by Seymour Chatman: “Style is a product of individual choices and patterns of choices (emphasis added) among linguistic facilities” [13, p. 11]. A somewhat broader view of style is expressed by Werner Winter who maintains that a style may be said to be characterized by a pattern of recurrent selections from the inventory of optional features of a language. Various types of selection can be found: complete exclusion of an optional element, obligatory inclusion of a feature optional elsewhere, varying degrees of inclusion of a specific variant without complete elimination of competing features [13, p. 13].

All of these definitions point to some integral significance, namely, that style is a set of characteristics by which we distinguish one author from another or members of one subclass from members of other subclasses, all of which are members of the same general class. They also show that an authorЄЄs style is regarded as something that belongs exclusively to the plane of expression and not to the plane of content.

Multilateral analysis of individual style determined some approaches in the investigation of this phenomenon: semantic stylistics (V. Vynogradov), linguistic poetics (V. Grygoriev, Y. Karaulov, Y. Nekrasov), systematic structuralism (Y. Lotman, O. Severskaya), communicative linguistics (N. Bolotnova). But despite the fact that the notion of the individual style has been widely discussed, it remains a category whose understanding is still vague.

Two “fields” of idiostyle. Thus, one may conclude that the notion of author's individual style is one of the most important expression of the anthropological approach in translation studies. Accordingly, we propose to consider the following two “fields” of idiostyle: the idiostyle of an author and the idiostyle of a translator. Then, in our opinion, the translation process can be seen as occurring in two stages: a) the insight in the source text and its perception in the psyche and consciousness of the translator according to his outlook and cognitive peculiarities; b) the process of translation, that consists in a transfer of the information in such a way as it was perceived by the author, using the following linguistic and stylistic features that are characteristic of his literary language.

By V. Koptilov's definition, “each translation is a field of struggle between an objective reflection of the original text and its interpreter's subjective interpretation” [7, p. 13]. On the one hand, we propose to consider the investigation of an author's idiostyle as a “preliminary stage of translation”: before one starts working on a translation, it is necessary to examine the author's idiostyle in order to preserve it in translation. The interpreter's idiostyle should not “cover” the author's idiostyle at any of these levels: 1) the lexical level (translator saves the metaphors, imagery, vocabulary register used by the author); 2) the syntactic level (typical syntactic structures (nominative, impersonal, compound, etc.) are saved; 3) the phonetic level (typical alliteration, assonance, etc. (especially in poetry)). On the other hand, the main purpose of translation is not only the transfer the contents of the text, but also preservation of the author's idiostyle. From this point we may talk about natural stratum of author's and translator's idiostyles, since translation process is a cognitive activity and takes place in the brain and psyche of a man. A translator cannot just be a mirror where the information is displayed clearly with the semantic features of its submission.

Illustrations for the “two field” concept of idiostyle. The illustration of this point is provided in the example from the novel “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens (translated by V. Cherniahivska): “Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir, and had thirteen children of her own, and all on 'em dead except two, and them in the wurkus with me, she'll know better than to take on in that way, bless her dear heart! Think what it is to be a mothe” [12]. - Хай вона, сердега, проживе стільки, як я, та приведе тринадцятеро дітлахів, і всі вони їй помруть - тільки двійко лишиться, та й ті сидітимуть, як і мої, з матір'ю в робітному домі, тоді вона іншої заспіває ...Самі подумайте, серденятко моє, що то бути матір'ю!” [5, р. 16-17].

This example shows that Dickens' literary language is colorful and has many different features of the author's style, among them - imagery (landscape, situational, emotional). From the given example, we see that the translator has retained this feature of the author's style, but by means of changing the imagery. It is evident that the author deliberately repeats “Lor bless her dear heart”. The equivalent variant will be “Боже, помилуй її (душу)”, “Помилуй її Бог”. The word combination “dear heart” is used to describe a nice person and has a positive conotation (“серце моє”, “душа моя”), in addition it can also be translated as “Боже мій!” The translator totally withdraws the religious motive that could have served as a definite feature of the character , and instead uses the noun “сердега”, the appeal “серденятко моє”, while they are absent in the original. All these translation solutions are based only on the translator's perception of the novel , the translator understood words of the character with a faint of regret, sorrow, and in the second case - the affectionate reference to another character. The same can be said about the phraseological unit “заспівати іншої” that is also introduced by the translator herself. But this phraseological unit has a clear negative semantic coloring that doesn't correlate with the previous noun “сердега”, where the treatment to the character is rather good. Thus, we see that the translator took charge to change figurative meanings, to withdraw something, and to add something - the translator felt the author's idiostyle and its semantic dominant according to his own worldview, and delivered it by the linguistic means typical for his style of language.

As an another example let us set a quote from a novel of Jonathan Swift's “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships” (translated by U. Lysniak und M. Ivanov):

“He sent me to Emmanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years; and my father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, sometime or other, my fortune to do” [14]. U. Lysniak used the grammatical transformation and divided this sentence into two parts: “На чотирнадцятому році мене віддали до коледжу Еманюеля в Кембріджі, де я пробув три роки і вчився дуже старанно, однак витрати на моє утримання були для батька, чоловіка небагатого (хоч одержував я не бозна-скільки), завеликим тягарем; тому через три роки мені довелося піти в науку до видатного лондонського хірурга містера Джеймса Бетса, у якого я вчився чотири роки. Час від часу батько надсилав мені трохи грошей, і я витрачав їх на вивчення навігації та інших галузей математики, корисних для тих, хто збирається подорожувати, бо завжди думав, що рано чи пізно мені випаде така доля”.

In the translation made by M. Ivanov this sentence is divided into four simple ones: “На чотирнадцятому році мене віддали до коледжу в Кембриджі. Там я пробув три роки і вчувся дуже старанно. Та в батька, чоловіка небагатого, не стало коштів тримати там довше. Тому через три роки мені довелося піти в науку до видатного лондонського хірург містера Бетса, у якого я вчився чотири роки. Вряди-годи батько присилав мені трохи грошей,і я витрачав їх на книжки з мореплавства та пов'язаних із ним галузей математики, бо весь час мріяв стати моряком і вірив, що рано чи пізно, а мені пощастить здійснити цю мрію”. We see that both translations tried to adapt Jonathan Swift's writing manner (the use of long syntatical structures) to children's audience by means of total changing of idiostyle and amending the sentence according to their vision of children's literature.

Conclusion. Thus, we determined that the notion of idiostyle is one of the most important expressions of the anthropological approach in translation studies. Each individual not only perceives the language and the information transmitted by means of language differently, but also uses it in an individual way. A translator is to deal with an important task - to feel the imagery of the text, to transfer it by means of the native language, to distinguish the author's linguistic phenomena and to manage to pass them in translation. It was also found that translation is a cognitive mental process, so translators cannot “mirror” the author's idiostyle directly. We have also demonstrated the process of stratifying translator's and author's idiostyles. Therefore, in our opinion, the attempt to demand for a translation to save the author's idiostyle in full is a dead end of translation studies, because it is impossible for physiological reasons and overlapping of idiostyles will occur in any case. In our judgement, it would be better to pay more attention to the notion of “idiostyle”, and for example, impose a mandatory translation commentary to each prose work, where translators could explain to the reader how they see the main features of the author's idiostyle and how they manage to transfer them: what descriptive means have been used, and what have been withdrawn for some reasons.

We realize that this approach does not solve the problem of saving and transferring the individual author's style, but firstly may call translators to introspection, which is a means of evaluating their own achievements and correcting of errors and hence self-perfection, and secondly, it will enable the reader to understand that he deals exactly with a translation, which may differ from the original. After all, taking a translated work, especially if it is translated by several people, a reader can verify his own vision of the author's idiostyle with the one embodied in the translation, and thus obtain more objective impression of the work.

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