ABSTRACT
“Style is the result of choice—conscious or not,” asserts Leo Hickey (1989: 4) in his introduction to The Pragmatics of Style. The subject of this book is how and why style differs in translations, how we might approach the sub- ject of style and choice by centring on the translator and the composition of the target text (TT). The famous story of the translation of the Pentateuch relates that 72 translators gathered in Alexandria worked solidly on the text for 72 days, commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the third century BCE. Each translator, tells the letter of Aristeas, worked individually in a small cell. However, when their work was completed and their different translations came to be examined, it was apparently discovered that the text of all 72 translations was identical. This was taken as proof that the word of God was true and unchanging, which allowed it to be uncorruptedly transmitted through translation. Of course, most consider this account to be symbolic; it is a cliché or a given that no two translations, or indeed any two pieces of writing, let alone 72, will be identical. When this does happen, we assume that something extraordinary or untoward lies behind it—if a higher authority is not ensuring the transmission of the word, then there must have been collaboration or copying between translators or, in modern-day techni- cal translation, a computerized database, termbank, or machine translation must have been used to ensure consistency.
