ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how a cognitive view of style in its various aspects might help and explains what translators find in the text and what they do with what they find. It explains that what gives a literary text its special literary character lies in its style. It is the style which allows the text to be open-ended and ambiguous, to invite the involvement of the reader, to contain implicatures which the reader can base inferences upon, to give expression to feelings and attitudes and to do all this by virtue of its relationship with meaning. A cognitive stylistic view of translation suggests that as readers we see style as a reflection of mind, and attempt to grasp that mind in reading and to recreate it in translation. The primary focus of cognitive is neither the application of insights from cognitive linguistics to literature nor from literature to the mind, but the bigger questions about the nature of literature itself.
