Narrative Report of Speech Acts as characterization resource in Mansfield Park and its Spanish and German translations

Abstract

In Jane Austen’s novels conversation provides internal evidence of the nature of characters, both moral and social (Morini, 2009). Among the interplay of speech presentation forms (Bray, 2018; Page, 1972), Narrative Report of Speech Acts (Leech and Short, 2007) is still underresearched (Busse, 2020) as a characterisation resource. Research on speech reports in inquit formulae has focused on illocutionary features (Austin, 1962; Searle and Vanderveken, 1985). However, speech reports also introduce the intersubjective stances adopted by characters and by the narrator, i.e., their receptiveness to disagreeing positions. As engagement resources (Martin and White, 2005), they construct interpersonal styles and offer cues into the narrator’s own stance toward the characters. Such meaning complexes are a challenge for literary translators. For this study, 55 instances of NRSA were sampled from three chapters of Mansfield Park and their correspondences in two Spanish and two German translations. The original text and the translations display remarkable lexical richness, with 36 instances overtly expressing illocutionary force. Characterisation cues appear at the character level of discourse, through the illocutionary features and engagement types attributed to characters (e.g. monoglossic, heteroglossic), and also on the narrator level of discourse, through linguistic co-textual choices weakening the endorsement of the character. All four translations contain shifts affecting the characterisation potential such as changes in a character’s stance, the early disclosure of a character’s attitude, and the insertion of explicit narratorial evaluation of a character. These findings are applicable in stylistics as well as in translation assessment and pedagogy.