Theory of Translation 1 Introduction

(I) Use of Linguistics
Earlier, stylistics was confined to observe how meaning in a text was created through 
the choices of the writer. In other words, structuralism dominated stylistic studies as it 
referred to the text to be self-referential toward the notion that the artistic form and 
meaning emerge from the exchange of ideas. Recently, stylistics has shifted from the 
Saussurian structuralist ideas to pragmatic and contextual studies. The post-
structuralist ideas examine the textual features like the role of speaker in shaping the 
meaning of the utterance.
 
Recent researches in pragmatics show that meaning in the text is not stable and text 
bound. It depends on various factors such as interpretation by a reader or listener, 
contextual features like cultural background of the reader and the situation in which 
the reader reads the text. Stylisticians now are more interested in the “systematic ways 
languages is used to create texts which are similar or different” and to link the choices 
in texts to social and cultural context. In short, stylistics is moving towards the study 
of the relationship between the text and context. 
(II) Objective Criteria 
In the second aspect, Thornborrow and Wareing insist on objective criteria to the 
application of subjective values. Adopting objective criteria may avoid stylistic 
evaluation of a text as it was done earlier. This criticism was upon close reading of the 

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text, selection of some features from it and analyze with a view to judge it. The pitfall 
in this method was the personalized selection and criteria. Two critics, for instance, 
could select two totally different criteria to reach opposite judgments. Thornborrow 
and Wareing explain: “Stylistics did not reflect the views of the individual critic but 
an impersonal, reproducible truth. Anyone … conducting the same stylistic procedure 
ought to arrive at the same results” (p. 4).