The role of intralinguistic factors in recreating stylistic equivalents in literary translation (exemplified by American fiction)

Abstract

The paper proposes viewing intralinguistic factors inherent in the source and target languages as strictly given organized systems, being effective means in recreating the original’s various stylistic peculiarities in its translated version and in attaining its stylistic equivalence. The detailed analysis of the factual material, represented in the form of parallel textual excerpts borrowed from an American satirical novel and its published translation incorporating stylistically marked lexical units, is carried out on the basis of their resemblance erroneously established by the translator, which proved to be far from the equivalent one. The analyzed examples of translational means and transformations aimed at stylistic adequacy are grouped according to intralinguistic units, as well as a specific stylistic instrument used in the original or in the translation such as combinatorial discrepancy, pun, alliteration, lexical repetition. Apart from purely stylistic aspects, the authors also consider accompanying semantic and specific national features of the original – either erroneously understood and therefore inadequately translated or absent in the translation. All this taken as a whole, and the distortion of the stylistic coloring of the original first and foremost, cast doubt on the plausibility of the described situations and the characters’ speech characteristics, inevitably resulting in inadequate translation. In the accompanying commentaries the unsuccessful variants are opposed by the authors’ own stylistic equivalents that could have been attained with the help of the translational means and transformations based, among others, on the intralinguistic factors, showing the capacity to solve translational tasks to successfully render the stylistic peculiarities of the original.

Keywords

• intralinguistic
• stylistic
• adequate
• equivalent
• translation
• nonce word
• pun
• alliteration