i) The textual meaning of the source text is more than just the words on the page because it is dependent on context. This is a view shared by Marxist criticism (c.g. Eagleton 1986), and pragmatic linguistics (Sperber & Wilson 1995), by contextualized stylistics (Verdonk 2002) and by cognitive approaches to translation (Tabakowska 1993). Much of what goes beyond the immediate and obvious meaning of lexis and syntax of the source text is in its style. The attitude expressed in the text is in its style (Sperber & Wilson 1995), the basis for reader engagement is in its style (Pilkington 1996), the expression of cognitive state is in its style (mind style, as Fowler 1977a). Therefore it is highly important for a translator to be as stylistically aware as possible, and to use the style as the basis and focal point for a translation.

ii) Reading is a cognitive process; the translator as reader of the source text plays an active role in constructing a reading, which involves the construction and modification of contexts. This assumption is based on Reader-Response Theory (Iser 1979), Relevance Theory (Gutt 2000) and many other pragmatic approaches to literature (Lecercle 1990), language (Sperber & Wilson 1995), and translation (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985). This applies equally to the reader of the target text.

iii) The translator can convey some of the richness and the openness to reader involvement of the source text if it is borne in mind tht the style represents (author's, narrator's, character's) choices (Thornbor-row & Wareing 1998). This is not to say that these choices represent different ways of saying the same thing but different ways of saying which reflect different ways of seeing; what is said also varies according to how it is said. One of the ways such choices are reflected in the style of the source text is in its use of what Relevance Theory calls weak implicatures (Pilkington 2000), what Reader-Response. Theory has called gaps in the text (Iser 1979), and other writers have called weakly-implied meanings (Montgomery et al 2000). These reflections of choices in the source text, if carried over to the target text, allow for the reader of the target text to similarly engage with the text and create new meanings.

iv) The difference between literary and non-literary texts is crucial for translators. Literary texts (and some non-literary texts such as letters, journalistic articles) convey a cognitive state. For the translator, there is no need to focus on trying to replicate the effects the original text might have had on its original readers (Nida & Taber 1974), because recreating something of the cognitive state will enable some of its effects to be relived by the reader. Furthermore, constructing a reading of a literary text involves an infinite search for possible contexts; literary texts contain elements which promote such searches. A literaгy translation must give its readers such possibilities for prolonged searches, or it will not have achieved its literary effect. Though some of what applies to the reading and translation of literary texts also applies to non-literary texts (Pratt 1977; Short 1986), there will usually be fewer weak implicatures in non-literary texts and they might be less weak, thus manipulating the reader rather than inviting the reader's engagement.

v) The meaning of the source text is neither exclusively text-immanent nor simply universal but is a mix of universal themes, cognitive possibilities, and specific description, and involves the cognitive context of the reader. Stylistic figures in the text such as metaphor, iconicity, ambiguity and the like are not merely in the text. They have cognitive correlates (Tabakowska 1993; Stockwell 2002a), and in this cognitive sense they have both a universal basis and an individual context which is to some extent culturally bound. Translators need to make decisions especially about what to do with their culturally-bound and individual aspects. These are the sorts of decisions affected by translation strategies such as foreignizing and domesticating (Venuti 1995), or producing an overt or covert translation (House 1981).

vi) A translator's work will proceed by “pretending"s/he knows what the text (or by extension its author) is saying, just as the recipient of any act of communication will; that is, the translator will take implications found in the text to be implicatures (or intended implications). At the same time a stylistically-aware translator will know that s/he has constructed this view of the author and that the author is therefore an inferred author (Boase-Beier 2004a).

Discussion based on a stylistic approach to the target text as product will be interspersed with discussion of translation as process. I can best illustrate the latter by using my own translations, and these are almost exclusively translations of poetry. 

责任编辑：admin