Style. Period. : The translation of punctuation and sentence splitting as stylistic features

This paper studies the translation of style in the book Die Welt auf dem Teller by Doris Dörrie (2020) from German into Swedish. It is argued that the style is partly held in punctuation and sentence length and the focus of the study is how these can be translated from German into Swedish, considering their importance for the text style. The analysis shows that the source text has a more differentiated use of punctuation whereas the target text is more restricted/neutral. Differences concerning how punctuation is translated are mainly due to grammatical differences but also a question of whether the punctuation can be experienced equally by the source and target text reader. Both circumstances have an influence on the translation. It is argued that Swedish readers expect shorter sentences and texts accessible to the reader. A higher density and more complex constructions are accepted in German. On average, shorter sentences are found in this translation, and the deviance is lower. When the sentence length in the source text is seen as a significant stylistic feature, this structure is kept in the translation. Otherwise, sentences are often split to become more accessible. When the sentence construction is kept, it is however still often shorter than the source text. As this is expected from the target text reader, the stylistic effect can arguably still be considered preserved. The translation can therefore be said to be more neutral on both sentence length and punctuation. The translation is giving the stylistic features space when this is considered a characteristic feature, otherwise, it is changed to fit the language norm.