Lexical Emphasis in the Literary Dialogue: A Translational Perspective

Abstract

Emphasis is largely associated with the expression of emotional involvement in speech acts in general. In the fictional dialogue, the relevance of emphasis is multiplied due to several considerations. Firstly, the emphatic utterances impact the emotional content of the text and affect its style and reception. Secondly, it is the compromises and the careful linguistic and stylistic choices that authors have to make in order to effectively render the emphasis typical of speech in the written mode. Thirdly, if a work of literature is translated, the emphasis that the dialogue displays is to be equally forceful in its target language version. With these considerations in view, the study sets out to examine the possibility of obtaining a similarly emphatic content of an English source text in translational Romanian by means of lexical items. To this end, a relevant number of emphatic dialogic instances have been depicted for analysis from John Fowles’s novel Mantissa and from its translation into Romanian. The objectives of this study are to identify the level of equivalence in the two versions of the novel and to shed a comparative light on the lexical means that lead to the realization of emphasis in English and Romanian.

Keywords

• literary dialogue
• emphasis
• translation
• lexical items