A Style-based Approach to Translating Literary Texts from Arabic into English

In this paper, a style-based approach to translating literary texts is introduced and used. The aim of the study is to work out a stylistic approach to translating literary texts from Arabic into English. The approach proposed in the current study is a combination of four major stylistic approaches, namely linguistic stylistics, literary stylistics, affective stylistics and cognitive stylistics. It has been shown from data analysis that by adopting a style-based approach that can draw from the four stylistic approaches, translators, as special text readers, can easily derive a better understanding and appreciation of texts, in particular literary texts. Further, it has been shown that stylistics as an approach is objective in terms of drawing evidence from the text to support the argument for the important stylistic features and their functions. However, it loses some of its objectivity and becomes dependent and subjective.