On Two Style Markers of Modern Arabic-Hebrew Prose Translations

Lea Sarig
Bar llan University
Abstract

Following Enkvist's method for establishing style markers, one 'positive' and one 'negative' marker of modern Arabic-Hebrew prose translations are constituted through a comparison of the translations with their respective original texts. A complementary intra-language study of original Hebrew prose fiction, which revealed the same style markers, shows that the findings are not translation-specific, but rather a language-bound phenomenon. Although the findings for Hebrew translations from English and German concerning the 'negative' style marker do not concur with the findings in the translations from Arabic, they nonetheless indirectly support the conclusion that it is language-bound.

Table of contents

One way suggested by Enkvist (1978) to establish style markers of a text is by comparing it with a certain 'norm', represented by another text. One condition that the text and the 'norm' have to fulfil, says Enkvist, is "a contextually significant relationship" (1978: 174), i.e., they must belong to the same genre, represent the same period, etc. The term 'norm' is thus [ p. 210 ]"shorn of its evaluative connotations" (p. 175) and made to serve as a mere basis for comparison. This leads Enkvist to the following working definition of style markers:

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