Linguistic Deviations and Literary Translation

This article is an attempt to shed some light on linguistic deviations in literary style and the importance of maintaining them in the process of translation. Literary translation means more than just a simple rendering of context; a literary translator should render cultural nuances, emotions, humor, allusions, stylistic deviations, etc. The French literary critic, Michael Riffaterre, offers a compelling approach to literary translation, arguing that this type of translation differs, to a great extent, from translation in general “for the same reason that literature is different from nonliterary uses of language” (in Schulte and Bigunet 1992:204). Literary language has always been perceived as unique, different from other types of language; one that deviates from standard everyday language in use, in that it violates the rules and norms of language to prioritize the way of transmitting the message rather than the message itself. A fundamental feature of literary style is a linguistic deviation that appears at various levels: lexical, syntactic, morphological, phonological, graphological, semantic, dialectal, register and historic. Thus, the article seeks to thoroughly describe, investigate and translate the above-mentioned deviations, in an attempt to familiarize researchers, translators and anyone interested in this field and the field of translation studies with this linguistic phenomenon. This investigation is based on different samples from well-known authors from Romanian as well as English and American literature.