Linguistic Structure, Stylistic Value, and Translation Strategy: Introducing Thomas Mann's Aschenbach in English

Abstract

By analysing closely two English versions of the opening passage of Der Tod in Venedig, this discussion addresses implications arising from the interlingual transfer of syntactic structures in literary texts. Even the most cursory glance at a translation corpus shows that prose translators - subject to language-typological constraints in syntactic possibilities - are generally concerned to mirror the sentence structures of the SLT in the syntactic composition of their TL versions. Here the contention is that, on the contrary, translation solutions cannot be ‘equivalent’ to the original at the level of complex syntax. Rather, translators inevitably make changes which significantly alter the information focus, agency patterns, and cohesion of the original, impacting on the literary meaning in subtle ways.