An examination of the extent of equivalence of an author’s literary stylistic features in two Turkish translations of a short story in English

Abstract

A distinctive personal literary style, unique to
 every author, is the foremost characteristic that gives a literary work its
 literary quality. Each style is a composite of syntactic and semantic
 components that evidence the literary identity of an author. In Translation
 Studies, style is the element that poses a great difficulty to translators with
 regard to establishment of equivalence between the source text and its
 translation. Readers who are able to read a text both in its original language
 and its translation are well aware of this fact as they notice the degree of
 losses of the stylistic features of the original text in its translated
 version. Thus, inaccurate or inadequate transfer of stylistic elements leads to
 a decrease in the flavor of the original literary work. The problem arises from
 the fact that sometimes in the translation process, not all elements which
 altogether create the exclusive style of an author, are given the due attention
 by translators who do not primarily intend to achieve a reasonable level of
 stylistic equivalence between the two texts. In this
 study, two Turkish translations of a short story titled The Denunciation
 by the American author Ernest Miller Hemingway will be compared with the
 original text and with each other in respect to the level of stylistic
 equivalence. The two translations and the source-text will be subjected to
 a descriptive stylistic analysis to highlight the necessity of equivalent
 transfer of stylistic features of a literary text in the translation process in
 order to preserve the original literary savor.