Towards a more comprehensive theoretical framework for translator style

Rui Sun
University of Science and Technology Beijing

Translator style is one of the two major focuses of corpus-based translation studies, alongside features of translated language. A critical examination of existing definitions and studies of translator style reveals that two crucial dimensions of the concept tend to be neglected: (1) the potential for a translator’s way of translating to vary across their works and change over time, and (2) specific aspects of a translator’s style that are similar to those of other translators. This article discusses the extent to which the metaphors for translator style capture the characteristics of the concept. It proposes a revised definition of translator style that highlights changes over time as an important trait. The proposed definition also emphasises that shared stylistic elements among translators may constitute part of an individual translator’s overall unique style. In light of this definition, the identification of a translator’s style does not have to rely on comparing the works of different translators. This article demonstrates how this framework can be used to investigate a single translator’s style by analysing Howard Goldblatt’s translation style through explicitation and implicitation in his translations of reporting verbs in Mo Yan’s novels, both collectively and over time.

Publication history

Date received: 10 March 2025

Date accepted: 14 April 2026

Published online: 8 May 2026

Table of contents

Since Baker (2000) proposed investigating individual translators’ distinctive styles using corpora, corpus-based research on translator style has attracted considerable scholarly interest and has developed into a well-established area of enquiry. Translator style is commonly considered to be a translator’s unique way of translating that is different from other translators (Baker 2000, 245; Munday 2008, 7; Saldanha 2011b, 31). The “thumb-print” (Baker 2000, 245) or “fingerprints” (Munday 2008, 7) metaphors are widely used for this concept. The predominant approach to investigating translator style in corpus-based translation studies is to compare individual translators to identify differences, either by examining a series of their works (e.g., Baker 2000; Olohan 2003; Saldanha 2011b) or by analysing their target texts (TTs) translated from the same source text (ST) (e.g., Winters 2009; Mastropierro 2018; Wang and Li 2020). With the use of machine translation (MT) in literary translation, translator style in literary MT has started to receive scholarly attention. These studies primarily aim to train MT models to reproduce the style of specific human translators (e.g., Hansen et al. 2022; Yirmibeşoğlu et al. 2023; Dallı et al. 2024), while a few focus on translator style in post-editing (e.g., Kenny and Winters 2020; Winters and Kenny 2024).

Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price. Direct PDF access to this article can be purchased through our e-platform.

References

Baker, Mona
1993 “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications.” In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, edited by Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1996 “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: The Challenges That Lie Ahead.” In Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, edited by Harold Somers, 175–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2000 “Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator.” Target 12 (2): 241–266. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1986 “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” In Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, edited by Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Juliane House, 17–36. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bosseaux, Charlotte
2001 “A Study of the Translator’s Voice and Style in the French Translations of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves .” In CTIS Occasional Papers 1, edited by Maeve Olohan, 55–75. Manchester: Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chou, Isabelle, and Kanglong Liu
2024 “Style in Speech and Narration of Two English Translations of Hongloumeng .” Target 36 (1): 76–111. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dallı, Harun, Olgun Dursun, Tunga Güngör, Sabri Gürses, Ena Hodzik, Mehmet Şahin, and Zeynep Yirmibeşoğlu
2024 “Giving a Translator’s Touch to the Machine: Reproducing Translator Style in Literary Machine Translation.” Palimpsestes 38: 15–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flach, Susanne
2017 Collostructions: An R Implementation for the Family of Collostructional Methods. V. 0.1.0. R package. www​.bit​.ly​/sflach
Hansen, Damien, Emmanuelle Esperança-Rodier, Hervé Blanchon, and Valérie Bada
2022 “La traduction littéraire automatique: Adapter la machine à la traduction humaine individualisée [Automatic literary translation: Adapting the machine to individualised human translation].” In Vers une robotique du traduire [Towards a robotics of translation], edited by Anne Baillot, Ellen Carter, Thierry Grass, and Pablo Ruiz Fabo, special issue of Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herrmann, J. Berenike, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, and Christof Schöch
2015 “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” In Empirical Methods in Literary Studies, edited by Gerhard Lauer, special issue of Journal of Literary Theory 9 (1): 25–52.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hou, Yu
2013 “A Corpus-Based Study of Nominalization as a Feature of Translator’s Style (Based on the English Versions of Hong Lou Meng).” Meta 58 (3): 556–573. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huang, Libo
2015 Style in Translation: A Corpus-Based Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kenny, Dorothy, and Marion Winters
2020 “Machine Translation, Ethics and the Literary Translator’s Voice.” Translation Spaces 9 (1): 123–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2024 “Customisation, Personalisation and Style in Literary Machine Translation.” In Translation, Interpreting and Technological Change: Innovations in Research, Practice and Training, edited by Ursula Böser, Sharon Deane-Cox, and Marion Winters, 59–79. London: Bloomsbury. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel
2014 “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On.” Lexicography 1: 7–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klaudy, Kinga
2008 “Explicitation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 104–108. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey Neil, and Mick Short
2007 Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, Defeng, Chunling Zhang, and Kanglong Liu
2011 “Translation Style and Ideology: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Two English Translations of Hongloumeng .” Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 (2): 153–166. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Kanglong, and Muhammad Afzaal
2021 “Translator’s Style Through Lexical Bundles: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Two English Translations of Hongloumeng .” Frontiers in Psychology 12: 1–10. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lynch, Gerard, and Carl Vogel
2018 “The Translator’s Visibility: Detecting Translatorial Fingerprints in Contemporaneous Parallel Translations.” Computer Speech & Language 52: 79–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mastropierro, Lorenzo
2018 “Key Clusters as Indicators of Translator Style.” Target 30 (2): 240–259. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020 “The Translation of Reporting Verbs in Italian: The Case of the Harry Potter Series.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 25 (3): 241–269. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munday, Jeremy
2008 Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Olohan, Maeve
2003 “How Frequent Are the Contractions? A Study of Contracted Forms in the Translational English Corpus.” Target 15 (1): 59–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2004 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Øverås, Linn
1998 “In Search of the Third Code: An Investigation of Norms in Literary Translation.” Meta 43 (4): 557–570. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary
2024 “announce.” Accessed 8 November. https://​www​.oed​.com
Rayson, Paul
2008 “From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4): 519–549. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ruano, Pablo
2017 “Corpus Methodologies in Literary Translation Studies: An Analysis of Speech Verbs in Four Spanish Translations of Hard Times .” Meta 62 (1): 94–113. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Saldanha, Gabriela
2011a “Style of Translation: The Use of Foreign Words in Translations by Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush.” In Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Research and Applications, edited by Kim Wallmach, Alet Kruger, and Jeremy Munday, 237–259. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011b “Translator Style: Methodological Considerations.” The Translator 17 (1): 25–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Séguinot, Candace
1988 “Pragmatics and the Explicitation Hypothesis.” TTR 1 (2): 106–113. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet
1995 Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation [orig. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais ]. Translated by Juan Carlos Sager. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Qing, and Defeng Li
2020 “Looking for Translator’s Fingerprints: A Corpus-Based Study on Chinese Translations of Ulysses .” In Corpus-Based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts: Present and Future, edited by Kaibao Hu and Kyung Hye Kim, 155–179. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winters, Marion
2004a “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Die Schönen Und Verdammten : A Corpus-Based Study of Loan Words and Code Switches as Features of Translators’ Style.” Language Matters 35 (1): 248–258. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2004b “German Translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned: A Corpus-Based Study of Modal Particles as Features of Translators’ Style.” In Using Corpora and Databases in Translation, edited by Ian Kemble, 71–88. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2007 “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Die Schönen und Verdammten: A Corpus-Based Study of Speech-Act Report Verbs as a Feature of Translators’ Style.” Meta 52 (3): 412–425. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009 “Modal Particles Explained: How Modal Particles Creep into Translations and Reveal Translators’ Styles.” Target 21 (1): 74–97. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010 “From Modal Particles to Point of View: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Translator Attitude.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 5 (2): 163–185. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2013 “German Modal Particles — From Lice in the Fur of Our Language to Manifestations of Translators’ Styles.” Perspectives 21 (3): 427–445. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winters, Marion, and Dorothy Kenny
2024 “Mark My Keywords: A Translator-Specific Exploration of Style in Literary Machine Translation.” In Computer-Assisted Literary Translation, edited by Andrew Rothwell, Andy Way, and Roy Youdale, 69–87. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yan, Jia
2013 布尔迪厄社会学视角下的译者葛浩文翻译惯习研究 [A study on Howard Goldblatt’s translation habitus from the Bourdieusian sociological perspective]. PhD diss. Shandong University.
Yirmibeşoğlu, Zeynep, Olgun Dursun, Harun Dalli, Mehmet Şahin, Ena Hodzik, Sabri Gürses, and Tunga Güngör
2023 “Incorporating Human Translator Style into English–Turkish Literary Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, edited by Mary Nurminen, Judith Brenner, Maarit Koponen, et al., 419–428. Tampere: European Association for Machine Translation. https://​aclanthology​.org​/2023​.eamt​-1​.40
Yu, Hailing, and Shangxing Guo
2016 “The Master Said, the Master Exclaimed: Reporting Verbs and the Image of Huineng in Translations of The Platform Sutra .” Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies 3 (3): 267–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhang, Dandan, and Zequan Liu
2019 “葛浩文中国文学英译风格新探 [A revisit of Goldblatt’s Chinese literature translations and his style].” TEFLE 4: 25–32.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
 
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue