CONVEYING THE INDIVIDUAL STYLE OF A YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE AUTHOR IN TRANSLATION (BASED ON “THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER” BY S. CHBOSKY)

Abstract

The article focuses on the problems of literary translation, mainly the problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author. The relevance of this topic stems from the insufficient analysis both of the notion of the individual style itself and the interconnection of the individual style and the genre of a literary text. The paper discusses the core theoretical concepts of the individual style as well as the main characteristics of young adult literature, and examines the specific features of transfering the style elements of a young adult author. The paper is based on the novel “The perks of being a wallflower” (1999) written by an American author S. Chbosky, and its translation into Russian made by E. Petrova in 2013. The purpose of the research is to identify some dominant elements of the author‟s style and to evaluate the degree of their adequacy in the Russian translation. In the course of the study, the following problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author were identified: a specific narrative structure, the usage of colloquial vocabulary; a number of specific syntactical stylistic devices. The paper examines a set of examples illustrating these features of the author‟s style and analyses their translation into Russian. The analysis reveals that the author‟s individual style is often not adequately transferred, thus, alternative variants of translation that convey the key elements of the author‟s writing style may be provided. As a result, a conclusion is made that the individual style of a young adult literature author has its own peculiarities, and its appropriate preservation requires not only a general understanding of the genre‟s specific features, but the skills of a linguostylistic analysis of the text and the ability to translate certain lexical means and stylistic devices that an author can use at all language levels.

Keywords

• literary translation
• young adult literature
• young narrator
• polysyndeton
• individual style
• colloquial vocabulary