Translating Personalities: A Stylistic Model

Although it is a commonplace of translation training that a thousand translators will produce a thousand different versions of the same source text, it is only recently that translation scholars have begun to investigate translators’ individual contributions in anything approaching a systematic manner. Before the mid-nineties, even when translation was viewed as a “manipulation” or “rewriting”, the emphasis was usually on the “norms” directing the translator’s choices rather than on the individual nature of those choices. Ever since Venuti’s and Robinson’s attempts to dismantle the myth of translational “invisibility”, the time has been rife for an appreciation of how each translator invests his/her own target text with his/her own individual “style”. In this article, Morini views “translational style” as the expression of the translator’s personality, and observes the strategies whereby translators erase their own signature from the target text. Contrary to what one would expect – and to Venuti’s pairing of “fluency” with “invisibility” – this erasure often makes it evident that the translation is a translation, involving as it does a very close adherence to the syntax and lexicon of the source. And while certain sectors of the book market may allow for a moderate degree of “translational style” to surface in the target text, others hold their source authors in such awe that no “stylistic” straining is allowed from the model.