A question of style
by Lingo24, 3rd July, 2006
It’s all a question of style
It’s all a question of style. You need only cast your eye over the array of publications available on a newsstand to realise that there must be an audience for them, or a perceived audience at least. Are all of these newspapers and magazines ‘saying the same thing’ …? Yes, glossy covers and vivid images matter but it’s the words that adorn the front pages that make the sales. A careful choice of language style is all it takes to help reinforce values and establish an identity designed to engage the target readership. The words that we use define us. This is not to say that our age, gender and culture limit our style or our ability to adapt it. Just listen to a newsreader or talk-show host on TV and you’ll hear how their style is modified for the purpose of the message and deliberately chosen with considerations of the audience in mind. With the written word in view therefore, it is the skilled author who can replicate intonation, tone of voice and other often routine features of speech and who can make creative use of lexical and grammatical choices to create a text that will achieve the purpose for which it was intended - namely audience persuasion. We all have this skill and have the ability to adjust our use of different language styles in everyday situations without perhaps being aware of the shift. You may consider your tone to be neutral but your ‘plain, everyday language’ although commonplace is, nonetheless, a specific way of conveying a message with the minimum emotional involvement. Anything from a formal letter to a text message with the obligatory smiley will employ a language style chosen to be appropriate to the topic and audience. Good style is, in fact, efficient communication. Important, when you consider the instruction booklet printed to deliver factual information or the job application intended to impress your prospective employer or the marketing campaign designed to sell you the pair of perfect jeans. These will be effective if they meet the expectations of the reader. How does a writer decide upon a style? The level of formality will depend, among other things, on whether the intention of the text is to inform or persuade. Irrespective of the topic, however, the text should be written in such a way as to convey complete confidence in the author's mastery of the subject matter and this will be achieved by the use of style – layout, the correct register and terminology. Technical terms, legal contracts, financial reports or advertising copy may all use their own field-specific ‘jargon’ or ‘buzz-words’ which identify them as belonging to a particular group – easily identified by the insider but offering obscured intelligibility for those unfamiliar with the style in question. Now imagine that such a text requires translation…all the skill that went into creating the well-written source document must be taken into account if a faithful rendition is to be produced in translation. The translator is therefore confronted with the following tasks: understanding the source document and transferring information with clarity and accuracy, with due consideration given to the intended reader, so that the document appears to have been originally written in the native language of the reader. Simple enough? Take the translation of a user manual; if the translated document permits the reader/user to master the product easily, because the information is clear and use of terminology accurate, then this is down to the use of an appropriate writing style, with greater emphasis given to the referential meaning of words. Translating involves far more than merely finding corresponding words between two languages. The words themselves will leave very little impression if the language style has been overlooked. Of course, with literary and creative texts, the style will be more evident but not more significant. Not only is a message being conveyed but this message should impact on the reader in a very particular way—this is crucial to a successful translation and, above and beyond grammar and syntax, style is one of the translator’s greatest challenges. The translator with shrewd judgement must take into account not only the vision of the author but also any differences in culture or ways of thinking that might apply in the target language. Translating a literary or creative text, however, is another matter, because of the importance of staying faithful to both the content and the style of the author, the latter involving more of a subjective evaluation. The challenge of this becomes clear when a translator must render a text comprehensible to someone from a different culture with different values and ways of thought – and yet still strive to draw a reader into the author’s world of imagination. The cultural differences between some countries, say the UK and Japan, are so great, that these are manifested in writing styles as fundamental differences in organisation and tone. Direct translations from English into Japanese can sometimes be considered crude and lacking in subtlety, and direct translations of Japanese into English can appear meandering and lacking in clarity. These types of translation fail to meet their goal. For the purposes for cross-cultural communication, it may be the case that the author’s meaning should be communicated by using entirely different words. Is there then an argument for rewriting the original? Give a room full of translators the same passage to translate and you will invariably end up with very different, though accurate translations. Can any one of them be considered more correct than the other? If you then tell each translator that their translated passage should be targeted towards a specific readership, the choice of style will impact upon the original message to a point where the same words no longer ‘say the same thing’ and will sell themselves to the individual target….and this leads us back to the newsstand where we started.
© Lingo24
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