A phraseotranslatological-based approach to literary translation

Abstract

The production process of a literary text allows us to combine the words in several possible ways, from 1) the common free combination (to look at a picture) to 4) the original free combination (the road wound uphill) passing through 2) the pre-set combination (to get around an obstacle) and 3) the unfrozen pre-set combination (to *raffle an obstacle, i.e. instead of to avoid an obstacle). This procedure is the result of adding the two principles of J. Sinclair (1991), the Mutual Choice Principle and the Open Choice Principle, and that of D. Siepmann (2008), the Creativity Principle. All of them contribute to build the idiomaticity of the literary text in a proportion that is variable and that converges to explain the differences in style from one text to another, from one genre to another, from one author to another. However, when it comes to translating that literary text we have to face the challenge of translating its idiomaticity into a language with different linguistic and cultural codes to those of the language of origin. Therefore, in this study we propose a new phraseotranslatological approach that offers guidelines that allow us to reach the same degree of idiomaticity in the target text, applying the same procedure (principles and ways of combining the words) to the translated text, but in a proportion that can be different from the source text, and yet not lose its idiomaticity.