The aim of the present paper is to identify features of translators’ style, comparing two German translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, both published in 1998. Speech-act report verbs are investigated as potential elements of the individual styles of the translators. Corpus analysis is facilitated by the use of corpus processing tools. The paper concludes with comments on the translators’ different usage of repetition versus variation and their effects.
Recent work in translation studies has established the literary translator’s voice as an ethical concern, but there has been little empirical research so far into how the translator’s voice is affected in workflows involving machine translation. In this article, we investigate how the use of neural machine translation influences the textual voice (Alvstad et al. 2017) of renowned translator from English into German, Hans-Christian Oeser. Based on an experiment in which Oeser post-edits an excerpt from a novel he had previously translated, we show how his textual voice is somewhat diminished in his post-edited work compared to its stronger manifestation in his translation work. At the same time Oeser’s contextual voice (ibid.) remains strong in his comments on the text he produces in post-editing mode. The article is offered as a methodological intervention and represents an initial attempt to design studies in literary machine translation that put the focus on human translators, allowing their voices to be heard more clearly than has previously been the case.
The present paper comprises a corpus-based study of translator style, comparing two German translations of the novel The Beautiful and Damned by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The translations, by Hans-Christian Oeser and Renate Orth-Guttmann, were both published in 1998. The study isolates the linguistic feature of modal particles in which the individual styles of the translators manifest themselves on the textual level and investigates the influence the translators' microlevel linguistic choices have on the macrolevel of the novel. An electronic corpus was compiled, comprising The Beautiful and Damned and its two translations, both entitled Die Schönen und Verdammten. A quantitative analysis was carried out to discover potential patterns of the use of modal particles by the translators, and the results showed that while both translators use modal particles to the extent and in the general context one would expect, they differ considerably in their choice and use of individual modal particles. The subsequent qualitative analysis takes a pragmatic approach, and discusses the selected modal particle wohl according to its communicative function, its role in speech and thought acts and in the narrative, and in the context of the respective narrative points of view. Finally it is argued that the two translators differ in their translation styles to an extent that affects the novel's macrolevel in that one translator provides a character study while the other focuses on societal issues.
The present paper shows a useful application of corpus methodologies to the genre of literary texts in translation with the aim of discovering attitude in translations and how a translator’s attitude influences her or his translation. The study is based on an English–German parallel corpus consisting of the original source text and two German translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novelThe Beautiful and Damned(1922), one by Hans-Christian Oeser (1998) and the other by Renate Orth-Guttmann (also 1998). An analytical framework will be developed that integrates, among other things, narrative point of view, speech and thought presentation and modal particles. Given that the main function of modal particles is to express the attitude of the speaker/writer towards an utterance or the addressee, they can be revealing of the translator’s attitude towards readers, the characters in the novel, etc. Thus, I investigate the attitude that speakers/voices reveal in the translations, how these attitudes are different from those in the original English text, how these differences reveal the translator’s attitude towards the characters and how this in turn influences the relationship between the characters in the novel and the readers of the translations. I conclude that the two translators differ in their views to an extent that affects the macro level of the novel and consequently has the potential to influence the reader’s attitude.
The present paper comprises a study of how the German word class of modal particles can be indicative of translator style. German modal particles as a word class are described in detail and I take stock of the research on this linguistic feature that moved into the centre of researchers' interest in the late 1960s and continues to be a topic of controversial debate. I show how corpus methodologies are useful in the identification and analysis of modal particles and provide a case study based on an electronic corpus that consists of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned and its two translations into German by Hans-Christian Oeser and Renate Orth-Guttmann, both published in 1998. A quantitative analysis reveals usage patterns of modal particles applied by each translator, as well as preferences of each translator for individual modal particles. A qualitative analysis with a focus on the modal particle wohl shows how it can be used to shift the point of view, explicitate the relationship between characters etc. and how these strategies affect the macrolevel of the translated novel.
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