Adequacy or Acceptability? Toward Making the Style of the Author Known

Abstract

Without translation, the style and technique of an author will not go beyond the borders of the author's country. Thus translators have an important responsibility for making known the style and technique of authors worldwide. In this study, based on Toury’s notion of ‘adequacy’ and ‘acceptability’, it is tried to highlight the significance of the role of translators in transferring the style of the author. To this end, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and its two translations, one by Saleh Hosseini and the other by Silvia Bejaniyan, are chosen as the corpus of the study. Woolf's style in To the Lighthouse, known as free indirect discourse, is discussed to see how the translators have treated her style in Persian. It is observed that Hosseini, having subjected himself to the ST, has been more watchful of Woolf's style creating an adequate translation rather than Bejaniyan, who, by moving towards TT, has domesticated the original text producing an acceptable translation hence ignoring Woolf’s style.