Translation of Ellipsis as a Stylistic Feature: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Its Persian Translations

Abstract

Ellipsis, as a cohesive device in a text, has to be considered as an index of style in a literary text, hence a challenge for the literary translator who is supposed to render faithfully the style as the author’s unique voice and the text’s identity. This article aims at investigating the strategies adopted by Persian translators to render the elliptical patterns of Hemingway’s masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea. It also tries to examine the effectiveness of using such strategies regarding the linguistic features of the target language. The model for analyzing the instances of ellipsis is that of the 8 main categories of frequent elliptical patterns as defined by Quirk et al (1985). Considering that English and Persian function quite similarly in most of these categories, it seems that the strategy of literal translation would be fairly efficacious in rendering this stylistic feature; also, expansion would help in cases where the two languages differ. The results showed that keeping the original style as closely as possible a few loyal translations have negotiated the two linguistic systems in terms of elliptical patterns. However, most Persian translators, inattentive to the style of the text have tended to interpret the pattern and expand the text, or simply delete the elliptical element whereby depriving the target reader from enjoying the author’s genuine art.