Style and Sociolect: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on the notions of translator style and sociolect in translated children’s fiction, with particular reference to Little King Matty, Adam Czasak’s version of Korczak’s tale published in London in 1990. Adam Czasak translated the book ten years earlier, however, when he was in his early twenties, and when asked about his translation strategy, he revealed that it was his intention to use a straightforward and accessible style rather than sophisticated, “literary” language in the text (telephone conversation, 8 July 2019). The translation is indeed written in colloquial British English, which is not only more informal than the language of the American translations but sometimes even more informal than that of the source text. Moreover, some of the speech patterns used in the translation may be associated with a particular social demographic, that is, the lower middle class or working class, and the translator uses such patterns for narration as well as in the fictional dialogues of children. Using traditional analytical methods and a corpus-based methodology, the chapter traces the translation’s prominent stylistic features, examining the recurrent use of characteristic lexical items and distinctive phonetic and grammatical patterns, such as h-dropping, tag questions and syntactic patterns for adding emphasis and focusing information in a sentence.