The concept of style is a complex one, and there are many different views of its nature. The simplest definition – the perceived distinctive manner of expression - given by Wales in her Dictionary of Stylistics (2001:371) will be perfectly adequate. This simple definition hides many complexities to do with what "perceived" means (whether by a reader, a critic, or a social group, for example) and what "distinctive" means, among other things. The role of style in translation is made even more complex by the fact that there are the styles of two texts, the source text and the target text, to take into account. And in each case, the style of the text can be seen in its relationship to the writer, as an expression of choice, or in its relationship to the reader, as something to be interpreted and thereby to achieve effects.
On the one hand, the translator is a reader of the source text, and so the effects of its style upon the translator need to be examined. Important issues to consider here are how style is read, how it achieves its effects upon the reader, and what its relationship to various factors in the creation of the source text is seen to be. For example, the style of the source text may be seen as "a set of choices driven by commitment to a particular point of view" and in this sense "it is style, rather than content, which embodies the meaning" or provides "a direct link to the work's basic thematic concerns and the kind of experience it attempts to convey. If this is the view held by the translator of a literary text, on the grounds that the text is by definition fictional, then s/he is likely to focus on the style of the source text as a clue to its meaning. So there is no straightforward relationship between the style of the source text and what the text means. And if we assume, as do many writers on stylistics and literary pragmatics such as Verdonk that to construct meaning in reading a text, just as in any other act of communication, is to attempt a reasonable reconstruction of authorial intention, it seems clear that the author to whom such intention is imputed is a figure inferred from the text. Different translators may hold different views on these arguments, or hold no view at all. But irrespective of whatever view the translator holds and whatever arguments s/he is aware of, the relationship of author to intention and intention to meaning in the text is no more straightforward than the relationship of style to meaning.
On the other hand, the translator writes a new text in translating, and so the style of the target text is an expression of the translator's choices. Some studies of translation consider how the style of the target text conforms to certain norms (of the genre, of the target language, or of the linguistic, literary or cultural system into which the target text fits). In the Descriptive Translation Studies of Holmes (1988) or Toury (1985, 1995), the focus is on the description of both process and product of translation, but especially upon actual translations and their relationship to the target culture. In the functionalist approach of Vermeer (1978), which sees translation as "purposeful activity" (Nord 1997), the focus is to a large extent on the target culture as a determinant in the process of translation, and so such studies have sometimes been seen as reducing the role of the translator to "a functionary of the target group" . Other studies look for traces of the translator in the target text; Hermans is insistent that the translator's presence must be posited in all translations.
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