Cоursе pаpеr “Stylistic use of foreign words and archaism” Writtеn by thе studеnt оf thе 408

CHAPTER II.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOREIGN WORDS AND ARCHAISM IN VARIOUS SCHOLASTIS SPHERES
2.1. The use of foreign words in stylistics (translation style)
Foreign words do not belong to the English vocabulary. In printed works foreign words and phrases are generally italicized to indicate their alien nature or their stylistic value. There are foreign words which fulfill a terminological function. Many foreign words and phrases have little by little entered the class of words named barbarisms and many of these barbarisms have gradually lost their foreign peculiarities, become more or less naturalized and have merged with the native English stock of words.
Both foreign words and barbarisms are widely used in various style of language with various aims, aims which predetermine their typical functions. One of these functions is to supply local color. In order to depict local conditions of life, concrete facts and events, customs and habits, special care is taken to introduce into the passage such language elements as will reflect the environment. In this respect a most conspicuous role is played by the language chosen.
The function of the foreign words used in the context may be considered to provide local color as a background to the narrative. In passages of other kinds units of speech may be used which will arouse only a vague conception in the mind of the reader. The significance of such units, however, is not communicative — the author does not wish them to convey any clear-cut idea — but to serve in making the main idea stand out more conspicuously. This device may be likened to one used in painting by representatives of the Dutch school who made their background almost indistinguishable in order that the foreground elements might stand out distinctly and colorfully [11,388].
Another function of barbarisms and foreign words is to build up the stylistic device of non-personal direct speech or represented speech (see p. 236). The use of a word, or a phrase, or a sentence in the reported speech of a local inhabitant helps to reproduce his actual words, manner of speech and the environment as well. Thus in James Aldridge’s “The Sea Eagle” — “And the Cretans were very willing to feed and hide the Ingllsi’’—, the last word is intended to reproduce the actual speech of the local people by introducing a word actually spoken by them, a word which is very easily understood because of the root. Generally such words are first introduced in the direct speech of a character and then appear in the author’s narrative as an element of reported speech.
Barbarisms and foreign words are used in various styles of language, but are most often to be found in the style of belles-lettres and the publicistic style. In the belles-lettres style, however, foreignisms are sometimes used not only as separate units incorporated in the English narrative. The author makes his character actually speak a foreign language, by putting a string of foreign words into his mouth, words which to many readers may be quite unfamiliar. These phrases or whole sentences are sometimes translated by the writer in a foot-note or by explaining the foreign utterance in English in the text. But this is seldom done.
Foreign words and phrases may sometimes be used to exalt the expression of the idea, to elevate the language. Words that we do not quite understand sometimes have a peculiar charm. This magic quality in words, a quality not easily grasped, has long been observed and made use of in various kinds of utterances, particularly in poetry and folklore. But the introduction of foreign speech into the texture of the English language hinders understanding and if constantly used becomes irritating. It may be likened, in some respect, to jargon [12,75].
The introduction of actual foreign words in an utterance is not, to our mind, a special stylistic device, inasmuch as it is not a conscious and intentional, literary use of the facts of the English language. However, foreign words, being alien to the texture of the language in which the work is written, always arrest the attention of the reader and therefore have a definite stylistic function. Sometimes the skilful use of one or two foreign words will be sufficient to create the impression of an utterance made in a foreign language.
Barbarisms assume the significance of a stylistic device if they display a kind of interaction between different meanings, or functions, or aspects. When a word which we consider a barbarism is used so as to evoke a twofold application we are confronted with an SD. The main function of barbarisms and foreignisms is to create a realistic background to the stories about foreign habits, customs, traditions and conditions of life [13,309].
In order to look at style from both source and target text perspectives, Munday looks at several translations by the same translators (Harriet de Onís and Gregory Rabassa) and at the work of one author (Gabriel García Márquez) translated by different translators (Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman). Munday’s main concern is the links between stylistic choices at the micro-level and the macro-contexts of ideology and cultural production; this inevitably draws him to pay closer attention to those linguistic features that can more easily be explained as meaningful choices (syntactic calquing, syntactic amplification, compound pre-modifiers, creative or idiomatic collocations) rather than the kind of patterns at the lower syntactic level that form the basis of Baker’s study and have proved more relevant in revealing the habitual aspects of composition. The discourse analytical approach allows him to establish a clear link between micro-level choices and contextual and ideological factors. The patterns revealed in the work of specific translators are often compared with reference corpora to see whether the strategies used by the translator respond to normalized/idiomatic preferences of the TL or are unusual/original uses.
A defining element of style is ‘distinctiveness’: in every work of fiction, certain linguistic features stand out because they depart from a norm; that is, they are frequent or infrequent in relation to a relative norm of comparison. In other words, for a stylistic trait to be distinctive or characteristic of an author or translator, it has to appear more or less frequently in the work of that author/translator rather than in that of others. This is the basis of what Leech and Short call deviance, which is perceived by the reader as prominence. From a methodological point of view, to demonstrate that a certain stylistic preference is distinctive of the work of one translator, we would need a range of texts by the same translator and a reference corpus, which would consist of, minimally, works by one other translator, and ideally, a representative sample of translations by other translators, working in the same genre and language combination. This is the type of corpus used here, although the reference corpus has some limitations as pointed out below. However, distinctiveness is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Halliday argues that the fact that a linguistic feature is prominent does not necessarily mean that it has literary relevance, since there are idiosyncrasies of style that have no discernible literary function [14,63].
Literary relevance is related to the Prague School notion of ‘foregrounding’, understood as artistically motivated deviation or, in Halliday’s words, as prominence that is motivated. For a prominent feature of style to achieve literary relevance it has to form a coherent pattern of choice, together with other features of style, and impact on the meaning of the text as a whole. In Halliday’s model, whether a pattern is motivated or not depends on whether it contributes to how the text functions at the ideational, interpersonal or textual levels and does this in a way that is coherent with other patterns. Thus, in order to talk about ‘translator style’, we need to identify stylistic traits that: 1) are felt to be recognizable across a range of translations by the same translator, 2) distinguish that translator’s work from that of others, 3) are ‘motivated’, in the sense that it has a discernable function, and 4) constitute a coherent pattern of choice. However, all these elements could point to the style of a translator only in principle, since other variables – such as author style or the specific characteristics of a sub-genre or a particular linguistic variety which the translator is dealing with, to name but a few – could also explain the recurrence of certain stylistic features. Therefore, it is also necessary to demonstrate that the stylistic traits can be attributed to the translator and cannot be explained as directly reproducing the source text’s style or as the inevitable result of linguistic constraints. A certain degree of diversity – for example, in terms of authors, genre or sub-genre, date of publication, place of publication, language variety and, where possible, language – in the corpus of translations by the same translator would go some way towards ensuring a minimal effect from each variable. However, comparison with the source texts is still essential in order to identify possible triggers for the choices made and explore explanations for such choices.
Since foreign words had not been tagged in the corpora and cannot be identified purely on the basis of graphic characteristics, the only alternative to retrieve a comprehensive list was to use alphabetically ranked wordlists automatically created in Wordsmith Tools and identify foreign words manually. The manual retrieval of foreign words from wordlists is extremely time-consuming. Nevertheless, the possibility of producing word lists automatically made the process quick enough for it to be cost effective, in a way that reading through the novels pencil-in-hand would not have been. Apart from being time-consuming, the manual identification of foreign words is prone to human errors. In order to ensure the highest possible degree of precision and recall, the process of identifying a list of foreign items was carried out in stages, starting with a very inclusive approach, to maximize recall, and ending with a very strict and restricted filter, to maximize precision. A single list was created for all the target texts in both corpora so as to avoid any possible bias from the researcher’s expectation that foreign words would be more common in one corpus than another. The first stage of retrieval, carried out by the researcher, involved extracting all foreign items with the exception of proper nouns, personal titles, foreign language quotations and titles of books, magazines, and so forth. The second stage involved the participation of a native speaker who went through the lists filtering out words that were undoubtedly of common use in English. Judging the degree of assimilation of foreign words in a language is a rather complex matter to be left to native speaker’s intuition, but there is no flawless method. The solution opted for in this study was to use inclusion in a standard, comprehensive, English dictionary (the Collins English Dictionary) as the ultimate criterion for considering a word as lexicalized in the English language [15,85].
Although, as Peters notes, ‘dictionaries themselves wrestle with the problem and their conclusions are sometimes inscrutable’, a dictionary still provides an informed and reliably independent standard against which the data can be assessed.