The Curious Case of “Translator’s Style”: What can Corpus Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics Tell us about the Mind Style of the Translator?

Abstract

If style in general is difficult to nail down, translator’s style is obstinately even more elusive. The phenomenon of “Mind Style” has been researched with a narrow focus on the author, or the characters/narrators of a fictional text and their idiosyncratic, or abnormal, perception of the world. This paper uses “mind style” as a key to investigating a translator’s style, benefiting from a balanced merge between quantitative (Corpus Stylistics) and qualitative (Cognitive Poetics) approaches. It contrasts two translations into English of Naguib Mahfouz’s, 1988 Nobel Laureate, Awald Ḥaratina (The Children of our Alley). The paper quantitatively traces the two translators’ different stylistic choices and consistent patterns, and qualitatively analyzes dominant schemata and conceptual metaphors, in an attempt to identify the mind style of each translator. If a translator is a reader of the original, then he/she brings to the same text an idiosyncratic mind style based on an individual recreation of the style of the original, which defines the translator’s fingerprint. The paper concludes that each of the two translators displays persistent patterns on the micro-level which accumulatively affect the macro-level style of the text, reconstructing a cognitive state that is individual in its nature to the translator.