The Influence of the habitus on translatorial style: some methodological considerations based on the case of Yorgos Himonas’ Rendering of Hamlet into Greek

Abstract

The subject of style in Translation Studies is a comparatively underdeveloped area. Due to the long-standing tendency towards the translators’ invisibility, most of the interest in the topic has focused on the style of the source text and the degree in which it is transferred in the target text. Nevertheless, style in translation inevitably encompasses the translators’ own style as well, in other words the choices translators make that are not dictated by the source text or the target language and culture, but are particular to their own writing. Bourdieu has shown that matters of taste, aesthetic appreciation and production, including linguistic production, can be the result of strong dispositions generated by the habitus. It is the claim of this paper that habitus can constitute the theoretical tool to account both for the manner in which translators interpret their source texts as readers and the particular choices they make during the actual translation production as writers. Methodologically, a combination of macrolevel contextual factors that take into consideration the translators’ whole life trajectory, with microlevel textual ones will be proposed. Furthermore, it will be claimed that the existence of patterns of translation choices, as well as cases of deviance from the expected translation practices constitute strong indicators that these choices are motivated by the translators’ habitus, instead of being random or idiosyncratic. The above points will be tested against the case study of Yorgos Himonas’ rendering of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Greek (1988).