Emphatic Italics in English Translations: Stylistic Failure or Motivated Stylistic Resources?

• Autores: Gabriela Saldanha
• Localización: Meta: Journal des traducteurs = translators' journal, ISSN 0026-0452, Vol. 56, Nº. 2, 2011 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Les corpus et la recherche en terminologie et en traductologie / Corpora and Research in Terminology and Translation Studies), págs. 424-442
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article argues that emphatic italics, a typographic feature regularly ignored by linguists and associated with poor style, have an important stylistic function in English, often working in implicit association with prosodic patterns in spoken language to signal marked information focus, thus fulfilling an important role in information structure and adding a conversational and involved tone to written texts. Emphatic italics are more common in English than in other languages because tonic prominence is the preferred means of marking information focus in English, while other languages use purely linguistic devices, such as word order. Thus arises the question of what happens in English translations from and into other languages. The study presented here looks at results obtained from a bidirectional English-Portuguese corpus (COMPARA) which suggest that italics may be less common in English translations from Portuguese than in non-translated English texts. This trend could potentially be explained by the use of common features of translated language, in particular explicitation and conservatism (also known as normalization). However, a closer look at the work of particular translators shows that the avoidance or use of italics is not a consistent feature of translations and may be a characteristic feature of the stylistic profile of certain translators.

    
    
    Plan de l'article
    
    1. Why italics?
    2. The communicative function of emphatic italics in English: marking information focus
    3. Information focus across languages
    4. Emphatic italics in English and Portuguese - a corpus-based perspective
    5. Emphatic italics in translated texts: evidence of features of translation or stylistic preferences?
    6. Emphatic italics as features of the translator's style in the work of Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush
    6.1 Corpora
    6.2 Methodology
    6.3 Results and discussion
    7. Conclusion