Style

The article deals with some “generic” features of Russian literature. The works of Russian thinkers are permeated by the idea of Russian writers’ exclusive fate, which consists in these writers’ discovering their own selves. Their artistic quest was aimed at comprehending the spiritual substance of a human being within themselves. Russian artistic school also implies the period of growth, the development of Russian national culture, its historical and cultural character, and according to N.Ya. Danilevsky and A.S. Khomiakov, it was convinced that our writers should take in the European heritage, but they should not limit their works to it. One should embrace works of different schools and become a free artist. The central and the most intense questions to consider for each thinker are those of Russian artists’ worldview, their spiritual and creative act (their unique “artistry”), the subject matter, lyricism, the artistic word, and particular types of creative works. It is not a coincidence that in their articles they have dwelled on the European (Catholic and Protestant) lifestyles and that of the Old Testament. They concluded that the Russian artistic type is characterized by “completeness and integrity of mind”, maturity and manhood, unparalleled sincerity, simplicity and directness in treating the subject matter, and artistic ingenuousness.

The present study aimed firstly at investigating the impact of translators' style on figurative language translation from English into Persian. Secondly, it intended to find which strategies were most frequently adopted by Persian translators to translate figures of speech into Persian. Lastly, the study sought to check the extent of transference of figurative features of literary texts in English-Persian renderings. To achieve these purposes, the English novel, Little Women by Alcott (1880) and its three Persian translations by Raiszadeh (1997), Akhavan (1996), and Morvarid (2000) were used as the materials of the study. The original novel, along with its three selected translations, were first studied carefully by the researchers and about fifty percent of the novel was chosen to be analyzed in terms of figures of speech, which are part of stylistic features of any literary text. Then, the figures of speech in the stated sample, besides the Persian equivalents of each of them used by the three translators, were identified. Finally, a hybrid model incorporating 5 strategies retrieved from Newmrak's (1988) and Baker's (1992) models of translating figurative language was utilized to examine the identified tropes and determine the type and number of strategies employed by any individual translator. The obtained results revealed that figurative language devices were translated from the source into the target language through a variety of strategies, which can be indicative of the translator’s stylistic tendencies.