Questionnaire.

The Role of Style in Translation

1. Why is the role of style in translation a complex one?

2. Why is style seen as an expression of choice?
3. What are the important issues that need to be examined when analysing style?
4. How is the relationship authorial intention – meaning in comparison to style – meaning?
5. What norms should the translator’s choices conform to?
6. What viewpoints can be adopted when discussing style in translation?
7. Is the production and understanding of style influenced by the structure of the mind?
8. What kind of knowledge should be part of a translator’s toolkit?
9. Which developments in linguistic theory and literary theory have been important for
stylistics?
10. What are the limits of text-based literary approaches?
11. What is the merit of the early structuralist Roman Jakobson?
12. How did Mary Snell-Hornby integrate different linguistic and literary concepts in her
approach to translation and style?
13. Did cognitive and social factors always play a role in stylistics?
14. Do stylistic approaches look at the same parts of the translation process?
15. Do translation writers view style in the same way?
16. How does style connect rhetoric to poetics?
17. What is the difference between stylistics and rhetoric?
18. What question is relevant for stylisticians concerned with the translation of style?
19. Which aspects of style are universal and which are inextricably linked with a particular
language?
20. Is the unity between form and meaning doomed to be lost in translation?
21. How did Roman Jakobson’ s view of stylistic figures such as metaphor and metonymy
contribute to later cognitive stylistics?
22. Which stylistic principles are seen as universal?
23. What types of translation does Jakobson distinguish in his 1959 article?
24. What contextual aspects have generally been neglected for the study of style in
translation?
25. When was a convergence of stylistics and translation studies signalled?
26. What kind of constraints can determine how texts are written and translated?
27. Who introduced the concept of “mind style” in linguistics?
28. Do you believe that linguistic choices reflect the workings of individual minds (e. g.
author, narrator, character)?
29. Give examples of salient and systematic patterns in a character’s communicative
behaviour that can lead to inferences about the particular workings of a character’s mind,
especially when these behaviours can be interpreted as non-deliberate.
30. Why is a fuller treatment of style needed by linking pragmatic aspects of stylistics with
sociological and cognitive aspects?
31. How could the pragmatic notion of “context” contribute to the study of translation?
32. What is the difference between Watts’ and Venuti’s views on cultural references?
33. Which stylistic approach allows translation studies to link universality with individual
choice?
34. Name some later scholars whose concern was the interplay of the universal and the
culture-specific.
35. Are “thinking for speaking” and “thinking for translating” comparable? Refer to Slobin’s
(1996) view.
36. What shift of emphasis occurs in a reader’s perception while reading a literary text?
37. Why does the literary text have a closer link to the source text than the non-literary one?
38. What terms does Christiane Nord (1997) use to characterise a literary translation?
39. Can literary translation be both instrumental and documentary?
40. Give examples of overt and covert translations.
41. What is an overt literary translation like in terms of style?
42. What is the role of style in the translation of literary and non-literary texts?