Translator Style Methodological Considerations

Significant advances, notably by Baker (2000) and Munday (2008), have been made towards identifying individual stylistic traits in the work of translators in recent years. However there is no clear theoretical and methodological framework to guide research in this area. This paper attempts a step in this direction by proposing a working definition of translator style and exploring the methodological difficulties of:finding convincing evidence of a consistent and coherent stylistic profile in the work of a translator The article examines the different methodological approaches adopted in previous work and tests the working definition proposed here through a corpus-driven study of the styles of two British translators, Peter Bush and Margaret Jull Costa. The analysis,focuses on the use of emphatic italics and foreign words and is supplemented by examining the use of the connective that after the reporting verbs SAY and TELL.