ABSTRACT
Stylistics traditionally and primarily applies linguistics to the study of style in literature, although it has extended its areas of research into various non-literary varieties, including new media and multimodal discourses (see Burke 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley 2014; Sotirova 2016). 1 Both stylistics and translation studies started thriving in the 1960s along with the fast development of modern linguistics (for a recent historical survey, see Boase-Beier 2014, 394–397). Although the literary translator’s choice of lexis, syntax, etc. frequently raises stylistic issues and literary translation therefore constitutes a congenial area of stylistic investigation, attempts at applying stylistics to literary translation were rarely found until quite recently, a situation Boase-Beier characterised as the “exclusion” of stylistic studies from the field of translation (Boase-Beier 2011, 75–76). The exclusion is partly attributable to the “erroneous understanding” that the analytic tool used by stylistics is early structuralist linguistics, which is too narrow to describe the complexity of literary texts (2011, 75). This is indeed an erroneous understanding since literary stylistics, in contrast with linguistic stylistics, well reveals the aesthetic effects of literary language and is often eclectic in approach, drawing on different linguistic models including the most recent developments (see, for instance, Widdowson 1975; Leech and Short [1981] 2007; Gregoriou 2009). Another reason underlying the exclusion of stylistics is that “most translation theorists have no background in stylistics” and many stylisticians “only speak one language” (Boase-Beier 2014, 395).
