Style As A Unit Of Translation: Towards A Unified Approach To Literary Translation Pedagogy

Résumé: Students of any discipline expect to be given explicit guidelines on the kind of competences they are meant to develop towards the end of their training. In many translation courses in Moroccan universities and elsewhere students reportedly still do not have such a roadmap. In working towards a resolution of the absence of a systematic and well-defined pedagogical approach to the teaching of literary translation in particular, this paper proposes for consideration a fairly well-structured approach based on the view of style as a viable unit of translation that would help overcome the cumbersome disputes over whether to opt for word-for word, sense-for-sense, literal or free translation. From a cognitive stylistic point of view, style is the central element that captures the ‘spirit’ and literariness of the original text and reflects the ‘author’s mind’. Because styles are affected by social and cultural influences, style-focused translation entails a systematic process that works with combined insights from the philosophy of hermeneutics, reader response and relevance theories. This paper aims to lay out clear steps for the implementation of an alternative holistic model for teaching literary translation, one that will allow students to engage in large-scale projects of translation instead of having them deal with isolated passages they would unlearn once they hand in their exam papers. A key competence emphasized in this model is the trainees’ ability to see ‘equivalence in difference’ while attempting to reproduce sameness of original effect in the target text. An English-translated francophone Maghrebi novel by noted Algerian novelist Assia Djebar will be assessed on this basis for illustration.

Publié dans la revue: AL-MUTARĞIM المترجم