Register features of Lithuanian and English translators’ prefaces

Abstract

Translators’ preface is one of the means for translators to show their presence and reveal some insights into translator-reader relationship. Specifically, analysis of the structural and linguistic features of translators’ prefaces may show how translators compose their role and presence in different societies. This research aims at analyzing authorial stance in prefaces as a direct link between the translator and the reader. The methods of genre analysis and corpus linguistics are used to analyze 30 Lithuanian and 30 English translators’ prefaces according to the four main components of stance taking: hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions. The analysis covers a wide range of examples of Lithuanian and English fiction books as the selected translators’ prefaces are written by different translators, published in different years and by different publishing houses. All examples are examined according to the elements of authorial stance presented by Hyland (2005) and Smetona and Usonienė (2012). The analysis has revealed that self-mentions are one of the main features of translators’ prefaces and proves that translators tend to refer to themselves and their contributions. Hedges and boosters are used fairly equally which indicates that translators seek to show certainty in their ideas but at the same time leave space for readers’ interpretations and alternative views. However, the lack of attitude markers reveals that Lithuanian translators avoid showing affective attitudes, whereas English translators show their evaluation of the original book. Also, Lithuanian translators adopt their authorial stance by referring to themselves and readers by third person plural pronouns whereas English translators use first person pronouns.