Is literature without style really literature? Many would argue that style, broadly defined, is critical to a work being classified as literature or to the so-called literariness of a text. In a similar vein, is a literary translation that ignores style really an adequate translation of literature? While provocative, these questions raise important discussion points in the context of literary translation, when many would argue that the reading of literature is about the experience of a text, as guided by the style. Hence, if that experience is changed as a result of the translation process, should this be cause for concern? How should this experience be analysed or measured, both for the original work of literature and for the translation? These concerns have lain at th‑e heart of literary criticism—and translation criticism alike—for decades, even centuries, and it is these concerns that are broached in this book.
So when Clifford Landers writes, in his so-called Practical Guide to literary translation, ‘The best advice about trying to translate dialect: don’t’ (2001, 117), it is not hard to see how a norm of ‘decaffeinat[ing]’ (Rodríguez Herrera 2014, 281), ‘standardis[ing]’ (Ramos Pinto 2016) or even eliminating language variation in translation is so prevalent, something that Hatim and Mason refer to as the ‘levelling effect’ of translation (1997, 66). That is not to say that Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro—the case study text used in this book—employs ‘dialect’, stricto sensu (see below), but the creative challenges that Queneau’s stylistic language varieties pose for translators and the strategies that these stylistic devices can and should inspire can at least be assimilated to those of a dialect in a literary work.
A literary author inevitably writes with a particular objective in mind—a particular effect or meaning that he or she wishes to achieve—and, in so doing, understands that the choices that he or she makes or the stylistic devices that he or she employs will, or are at least intended to, give rise to a more or less predictable effect or interpretation for the reader, which will in turn affect and influence the reader’s experience of the text as a work of literature. While staunch adherents of the death of the author (Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, among others) might take issue with such arguments for a variety of reasons, there can be no denying that stylistic choices are critical to the development of a literary narrative and discourse and to shaping how and the extent to which a reader interacts with a text from a cognitive perspective. What happens, therefore, when this textual experience is lacking, when the translation of a language variety, for example, fails to render that style in an ‘equivalent’ manner? Is the reader then denied a potentially essential element of the original authorship and the possibility of engagement with, response to and experience of the style in question, or does this have little effect on the reader’s overall experience of a text as a whole? These sorts of questions fall within the purview of stylistics or, in the case of translation, translational stylistics and are points that are frequently addressed in stylistic approaches to translation. However, there has been little attention paid, within translation studies in particular, to the sorts of tangible (i.e. observable or empirical) effects that stylistic devices have on readers. This lacuna is the driving force behind the research presented in this book.
The study of stylistic effects, and the inevitable corollary of such effects in the form of ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’, has a long-standing tradition in theories of authorial intent, reader-response criticism and later, deconstructionist and post-structuralist paradigms, which are discussed in brief in Chap. 3. These critical approaches have, in turn, fed indirectly into more linguistically oriented studies of literary language and its effects, with various names ranging from ‘literary linguistics’ to ‘cognitive poetics’. Although the details and methods may differ, at their base is a common core of what has been broadly termed ‘stylistics’, even if not explicitly recognised as such. If we accept that style can produce certain phenomenological effects and, hence, experiences for readers, as generally proposed, this postulate has clear implications for translation: namely, that such effects should be ‘carried over’ and produce the same (or ‘equivalent’) effects in translation. This problem feeds into a long-established discourse on the subject of equivalence and, more specifically, the eternally vague notion of ‘equivalent effect ’. Traditionally, these effects have been subject to various forms of linguistic scrutiny in translation—componential analysis, the consideration of translation ‘shifts’, comparative stylistics and ‘translational stylistics’ more generally, in addition to other, more general interests in translatorial constraints, such as (in)visibility and ideology, among others. The one feature common to all of these approaches is the almost intuitive, or at least subjective, nature of these analyses: they are based on what critics believe or assume to be true of a translation’s equivalence or of an idealised reader’s experience of a translation. We do not know whether the effect is the same and, typically, can only use the source text (ST) and target text (TT) as evidence of these intuitions.
Translation Studies (TS) has lagged far behind other humanities in empirical approaches (Alves and Hurtado Albir 2010, 34), and we know very little about how readers interact with translations (Pym 2010, 37) compared with the vast amount of natural reading research in cognitive psychology over the last half-century, much of which has been conducted using eye-tracking methods (for summaries, see Rayner 1978, 1998, 2009). Empirical methodologies such as eye tracking have started to gain traction in some paradigms of TS (see Kotze 2019 and Vandevoorde et al. 2019), such as translation process research (TPR) and audiovisual translation (AVT) (see Sect. 2.1), but such innovations have barely spread to textual reception-oriented studies at all (Hvelplund 2017; H. Kruger and J.-L. Kruger 2017). What this book therefore looks to explore is whether the eye-tracking tools, methods and principles that have been used extensively in cognitive psychology and have started to permeate TPR and AVT over the last decade can be turned to the study of cognitive effects when reading—how readers experience and interact with texts and, specifically, whether such an approach can be used comparatively—to compare the experience of ST and TT readers in order to investigate and measure this ever-ambiguous ‘equivalent effect’ in translation.
In essence, this research is presented as a ‘proof of concept’, aimed at demonstrating the utility of re-applying existing eye-tracking techniques to the investigation and comparison of cognitive effects in ST and TT readers. In order to test the proposed method, rather than employing specially constructed texts (as is common in reading research), an authentic work of literature was chosen as a case study. While a broad cross-section of literature could feasibly be selected—and should be actively encouraged in future research—given the methodological focus of this research, this book focuses on the exploration of stylistic, reading and translation theories and research methods, restricting the literary context to a single case study text in order to better frame the qualitative theoretical discussion and to avoid excessive discussion of different literary themes across multiple works when the primary innovation of this research lies in its quantitative empirical methods.
The case study text chosen to exemplify this methodology is Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959) and its English translation, Barbara Wright’s Zazie in the Metro (1960) , on account of Queneau’s complex interplay and juxtaposition of ‘standard’ French and what he referred to as néo-français (see Sect. 2.3.1) . This language variety employs a unique quasi-phonetic orthography and unorthodox grammar, creating the general impression of a highly colloquial, spoken style in written form. For the most part, Barbara Wright replicated Queneau’s French styles with considerable aplomb, though there are instances where, for whatever reason, the TT is lacking and arguably fails to produce the same stylistic effects. Thus, by comparing the styles of selected passages from the ST and TT and comparing how ST and TT readers experience these passages in an experimental setting, we can start to build a picture of whether an equivalent effect has been achieved at specific points in the text where the style—a discussion of which begins in Chap. 3 and continues through to Chap. 5—is most salient.
Before proceeding further, terminology must be briefly addressed in relation to the main stylistic focus of this book: language variation. As noted above, Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro employs a ‘spoken’ style that is not only inconsistently used (in terms of its orthography and syntax), but is also juxtaposed, at times, alongside what can be considered ‘standard’ French. While some might consider the former style to be a ‘dialect’ on account of the ways in which it reflects oral speech patterns, this book avoids the use of the term ‘dialect’, while at the same time acknowledging that Queneau’s néo-français does share certain similarities with both regional and social dialects. Therefore the term used throughout this book to refer to his spoken style is ‘variety’, defined broadly as ‘a term used in sociolinguistics and stylistics to refer to any system of language expression whose use is governed by situational variables’ (Crystal 2008, 509), and more specifically as:
The related noun ‘variation’ is further defined thus: ‘In sty...Any form of language seen as systematically distinct from others: thus the dialect of a specific region (e.g. Cornwall), any more general form distinguished as a whole by speakers (e.g. American English or British English), a social dialect, one of the forms distinguished in diglossia, a dialect used in a specific genre of literature, and so on. (Matthews 2014, 371)