The Linguist

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 17 @Linguist_CIOL avoiding a potential scuffle with a swift but gruff "Skeutadittaleur" (Qu'est-ce que tu as dit tout à l'heure?). This was translated by Wright as Wottusaidjusnow, and neutralised for my research to 'What did you just say?' Wright mirrors Queneau's strategy in an attempt to convey the 'foreignness' and spoken feel of the concertina-word. The gaze duration data revealed that the reading experience of the original and the English translation was virtually identical, with higher cognitive effort for both sets of readers; conversely, those reading the stylistically neutral version paid little attention to the expression. Later in the book, Zazie snatches a parcel containing a pair of jeans from a man. Following a short chase scene, a crowd starts to gather. The man describes the crowd as jitrouas – a quasi-phonetic rending of 'J3' (/ʒi tʀwɑ/), used in World War II to refer to French adolescents, who had ration cards marked 'J3'. In this case, Wright had little choice but to use an unmarked style ('post-war generation') because the concept of J3 does not exist in Anglophone culture. This phrase was therefore unchanged in the neutralised version. The French readers experienced high levels of cognitive effort when faced with jitrouas, but readers in the two English groups did not. The man then explains that Zazie has stolen bloudjinnzes, from the Anglicism blue-jeans. This, like many other concertina-words in the book, is a hapax legomenon – a word that only appears once in the written record of a language. Wright adopts a similarly creative solution (blewgenes), resulting in the same phonetic sound but a contextual mismatch due to the meaning of 'blew' and 'genes'. The combination of the phonetic code with the nonsensical morphological components had a pronounced effect on the reading experience of the translation. Most French readers had high levels of cognitive effort, but the English translation had a stronger cognitive effect. Implications for translation One trend from the data was quite unexpected. Reading is undoubtedly a highly idiosyncratic event, but there is still a strong sense of commonality in the experience. Heightened cognitive effects tended to be experienced by readers in the same places in the text. However, where the style was particularly foregrounded, the diversity in the reading experience was more pronounced. Gaze durations varied widely for words such as Skeutadittaleur/Wottusaidjusnow, but were relatively uniform for the 'neutralised' versions. The data therefore point not only to different reading experiences, but also to different reading strategies. Some readers take time to appreciate the stylistic choices, to understand them, and to interpret their meaning where the style is sufficiently 'open' to allow freedom in the reading experience. Others simply gloss over stylistic devices and pay them little attention. Where the style is 'closed', there is little to engage with, and less freedom in how to approach the reading, resulting in a far more homogeneous reading experience. Translators have tremendous power to shape the reading experience – as much power as the original author in fact. They are very much co-authors or co-creators, even when they are not explicitly acknowledged as such. While this assertion may be self-evident to many, the findings of this research – and in particular the dataset from the edited target text – confirm that the stylistic choices that we make as translators matter. We need not only to mediate the source text with awareness of and sensitivity to its semantics and cultural connotations, but also to be cognitively and emotionally aware. While Barbara Wright was not a theorist of translation studies (she expressed great disdain for the academic discipline and was in fact a musician by training!), she wrote that the translator "has to try to reproduce the rhythm […] of the original". For her, translation was a "performance" and she was the "accompanist". "Translating someone and accompanying them in music is more or less the same thing," she explained. This research has shown, with objective data, that style plays a fundamental role in our reading experience. Hence, the reading of the source text – before even considering the matter of translation – should be approached with a sensitivity to and introspection of our own experiences as a reader, heeding the peaks and troughs of attention brought about by the linguistic patterning of stylistic foregrounding. The choices that translators then make in their work should move with the ebbs and flows of the source text style, while also respecting the effects that these authorial choices set out to achieve. Literary translation is a complex and fascinating art, but one that can learn a lot from exciting developments in translation research, tapping into the cognitive and emotional dimensions of how we experience texts. FEATURES © SHUTTERSTOCK

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