CHALLENGES IN PRESERVING A WRITER’S STYLE IN TRANSLATION

Section: Articles Published Date: 2026-01-23 Pages: 189-197 Views: 47 Downloads: 17

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Abstract

This article examines the challenges of preserving a writer’s stylistic identity in literary translation through an IMRAD-based analytical framework. The introduction conceptualizes style as a multi-layered phenomenon encompassing lexical choice, grammatical structure, stylistic organization, and pragmatic meaning, emphasizing that stylistic distortion can undermine a text’s literary identity even when semantic accuracy is maintained. The methods section outlines a qualitative, interpretative approach grounded in translation studies, stylistics, and literary linguistics, employing multi-level linguistic analysis, comparative reasoning between source- and target-language norms, and an emphasis on the translator’s decision-making process. The results demonstrate that stylistic loss emerges systematically across lexical, grammatical, stylistic, and pragmatic levels. The discussion highlights the interdependence of these levels, arguing that loss at one level often triggers distortion at others, and underscores the ethical responsibility of translators to balance fluency with stylistic integrity. The conclusion affirms that stylistic preservation is not a matter of formal equivalence but of recreating an aesthetic and emotional experience within another language, positioning literary translation as a fundamentally human, creative, and interpretative act.

Keywords

literary translation, stylistic preservation, lexical challenges, grammatical restructuring, pragmatics, authorial voice.