Abstracts
Abstract
This article argues that emphatic italics, a typographic feature regularly ignored by linguists and associated with poor style, have an important stylistic function in English, often working in implicit association with prosodic patterns in spoken language to signal marked information focus, thus fulfilling an important role in information structure and adding a conversational and involved tone to written texts. Emphatic italics are more common in English than in other languages because tonic prominence is the preferred means of marking information focus in English, while other languages use purely linguistic devices, such as word order. Thus arises the question of what happens in English translations from and into other languages. The study presented here looks at results obtained from a bidirectional English-Portuguese corpus (COMPARA) which suggest that italics may be less common in English translations from Portuguese than in non-translated English texts. This trend could potentially be explained by the use of common features of translated language, in particular explicitation and conservatism (also known as normalization). However, a closer look at the work of particular translators shows that the avoidance or use of italics is not a consistent feature of translations and may be a characteristic feature of the stylistic profile of certain translators.
Keywords:
- emphatic italics,
- information focus,
- translator style,
- corpora,
- Portuguese-English,
- Spanish-English
Résumé
Dans le présent article, nous montrons que l’italique emphatique, un procédé typographique négligé par les linguistes qui la considèrent comme une faiblesse de style, remplit au contraire une fonction stylistique importante en anglais. L’italique évoque implicitement les structures prosodiques de l’oral en rapport avec un focus informationnel. Elle joue ainsi un rôle crucial de structuration de l’information et confère aux textes écrits certaines valeurs expressives inhérentes à l’oral. L’italique emphatique est plus courante en langue anglaise que dans d’autres langues, car si la première utilise l’accentuation tonique pour marquer un focus informationnel, les autres font plutôt appel à des procédés purement linguistiques jouant sur la syntaxe. Ces considérations soulèvent la question de la traduction depuis ou vers l’anglais. La présente étude fait état d’une analyse de données provenant d’un corpus bidirectionnel anglais-portugais (COMPARA), qui semblent indiquer que le recours à l’italique est moins courant dans les textes anglais traduits du portugais que dans les textes rédigés en anglais. Cette tendance pourrait s’expliquer par des caractéristiques communes à tous les textes traduits, notamment l’explicitation et la normalisation (« conventionalisme »). Un examen plus approfondi de traductions individuelles révèle cependant l’usage de l’italique est inconstant et que le choix de l’utiliser ou non refléterait plutôt le profil stylistique propre à chaque traducteur.
Mots-clés :
- italique emphatique,
- focus informationnel,
- style du traducteur,
- corpus,
- portugais-anglais,
- espagnol-anglais
Appendices
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10.7202/016728ar