The Translation of Ellipsis as Identity Marker in the Literary Dialogue

Apart from the ellipsis occurring in discourse as a fairly common cohesive device, the literary dialogue oftentimes uses ellipsis as a stylistic or rhetorical device or as a means of endowing characters with idiolectal or sociolectal features. This paper examines such instances of ellipsis which contribute to the construction of the literary heroes’ identity through their speech, while providing them with features distinguishing them from the other characters either in terms of social identity or emotional state. The study is based on examples depicted from the dialogue of a number of literary works written in English and selected so as to exhibit a variety of functions which ellipsis acquires to complete some heroes’ identity or state of mind. Considering the importance of the information embedded in such ellipses, a contrastive approach to translation is obvious. The analysis focuses on the translation of ellipsis from English into Romanian and scrutinizes the situations when structural differences between English and Romanian prevent formal equivalence, which triggers an important loss of information in translation. The findings lead to conclusions relative to translation solutions that can be adopted to compensate for the scarcity of structural similarities between the two languages in contact in translation