Unit 4 texts of official and business documents in the focus of discourse analysis in translation main points

4.2. The notion of a functional style as viewed by traditional Russian and Soviet stylistics

One of the basic categories of traditional stylistics, which dominated mostly in Russia and the former Soviet Union, is the notion of the functional style of language.

There exist many definitions of a functional style of language (FS) given by various writers on the subject.
Thus, I.R.Galperin [1977: 249] gives the following definition of the functional style:
“A FS is a patterned variety of literary text characterised by the greater or lesser typification of its constituents, supra-phrasal units (SPU), in which the choice and arrangement of independent and interwoven language media are calculated to secure the purport of the communication”.
For practical reasons of text analysis in translation we will reword this definition as follows:
“A functional style (FS) of language is a system of language means which serves a definite aim of communication”.
It is also assumed by I.R.Galperin [see: ibid.] that each FS is a relatively stable system at the given stage of development of the literary language, but it changes from one historical period to another. I.R.Galperin refers the notion of a functional style only to the written literary standard of language [Galperin 1977: 249], while other authors [see Арнольд 1981: 245; Брандес, Провоторов 2003: 92-97; Кожина 1977: 157; Мороховский, Воровьева, Лихошерст, Тимошенко 1991: 244-245] also list the colloquial style among the functional styles of language and speech. Whatever the academic argument may be, we will not discuss the colloquial style of language at length here, because professional translators and interpreters seldom have to translate or interpret colloquial discourse (unless it is imbedded into fictional texts) but mostly deal with written or oral literary discourse. No doubt that research into translation of fictional discourse (including colloquial discourse) is an important domain of translation studies, however this book focuses mostly on the analysis of literary non-fictional texts (types of discourse) leaving in-depth fictional discourse analysis for further investigation by other scholars.