Theory of Translation 1 Introduction

2.13.4.3 Stylistics: Definitions 
In the last few decades or so, the translation theorists have been paying significant 
attention to ‘style’. Yet, scholars have not agreed on the exact definition of what style 
is. The investigation has not taken a systematic shape due to the elusive nature of 
style. The term has a wide range of meaning. Etymologically, the word ‘style’ is 
derived from the Latin word ‘stylus’ which means ‘stake’ or ‘pointed instrument’ for 
writing. Leech and Short define stylistics as follows:
Literary stylistics has, implicitly or explicitly, the goal of explaining the relation 
between language and artistic function … The aim of literary stylistics is to 
relate the critics concern of aesthetic appreciation with the linguist’s concern of 
linguistic description (p. 13). 
Charles Bally comments that stylistics analyzes the features of the organized language 
of the text “from the point of view of their affective content, that is, the expression of 
sensibility through language and the effect of language on sensibility” (qtd. in Enkvist 
et al, 14). Goethe rightly comments that “Style is an active principle of composition 
by which a writer penetrates and reveals the inner form of his subject” (qtd. in Enkvist 
et al, 10). Stylistics analyzes the various resources of languages used in a literary text. 

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It is concerned with patterns of use in the given text. The purpose of stylistics is to 
discover the linguistic use in communication and how their effects are revealed in the 
way messages are organized in texts. Stylistics, thus, is the study of the social 
function of language and is a branch of what has come to be called sociolinguistics. 
2.13.4.4 Style: Its Theoretical Background 
Cicero and other classical rhetoricians classified styles into three main levels: the high 
(or ‘grand’) the middle (or ‘mean’) and the low (or ‘plain’) style. In the eighteenth 
century the doctrine of decorum was influential. M. H. Abrams et al inform that it 
required that the level of style in a work be appropriate to the social class of the 
speaker, to the occasion on which it is spoken, and to the dignity of its literary genre 
(p. 385). Northop Frye made a differentiation between two kinds of style 1) Demotic 
style, which is modeled on the language, rhythms and associations of ordinary speech. 
2) Hieratic style, which employs a variety of formal elaborations that separate the 
literary language from ordinary speech (qtd. in Abrams, 385). 
Also, style could be analyzed in terms of objective investigation of textual features. 
Scholars like Charles Bally commented that style could be studied on the basis of the 
impression of textual features on the reader (qtd. in Enkvist et al, 14). It is not 
sufficient for a translator to identify the stylistic elements of the text. While 
translating, in addition to discovering the stylistic features of the SL text, he has to re-
create the same stylistic features in the TL text. 
According to Prague School of Linguistics, ‘foregrounding’ is central to the notion of 
style. It is a device which has an aesthetic value because of the readers’ attention. It is 
achieved by the use of the unusual collocations, e.g. ‘colour of the taste’. Ian 
Mukarovsky, the Prague school linguist, states that all literary language is distortion 
of ordinary language. Literary texts are characterized by aesthetic and rhetorical 
value. The literary language has the feature of foregrounding. In literary texts, 
foregrounding serves the act of expression itself. Mukarovsky calls it deautomization 
of an act: “Objectively speaking, automization schematizes an event; foregrounding 
means the violation of the scheme” (19). Literary texts are artistic creations in which 
the difficulty and length of perception is increased, resulting in defamiliarization of 
the text. Defamiliarization is making the text unfamiliar which attracts the reader. 
Shklovsky claims it to be the basic aim of art: “The technique of art is to make objects 

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‘unfamiliar’ to increase the difficulty and length of perception” (qtd. in Pilkington, 18, 
emphasis in original). 
Generally, style is the selection of the particular words and their ordering at various 
levels. So, the ‘choice’ of the writer becomes his ‘style’. The choices of the writer are 
paradigmatic on one hand and syntagmatic on the other. Enkvist explains that style of 
a given text is “a function of the aggregate of the ratios between the frequencies of its 
phonological grammatical and lexical items in a contextually related norm” (p. 28). 
So, style, in his opinion, is the aggregate of the contextual probabilities of its 
linguistic items. The textual as well as extra textual context such as period, genre, 
dialect and interpersonal relationship are included in context.
Style is looked at as the comparison between texts by the same and different authors.
It may also include the study of the same and different genres: The used methods are 
derived from general linguistic theory. This approach considers style to be an organic 
part of text. The contextually oriented notion of register is useful in stylistics. It 
identifies the discourse in addition to the degree of formality between the speaker and 
the hearer. The degree of cohesion is significant in the whole discourse.