| This study consists of a stylistic comparison of selected excerpts of contemporary Hebrew and English novels with their respective translations. The purpose of the comparison is to identify and explain a number of general rules describing consistent patterns of stylistic change which occur during translation of prose fiction from Hebrew to English and vice versa. The significance of such study of translation written from the point of view of media ecology is that it attempts to interpret the implications of such patterns in the context of a much larger issue--that of the relationship between language and consciousness.;A lexical analysis of the source and target texts included in the study has not shown a consistent pattern of differences in the use of abstract concepts in Hebrew and in English. However, English texts may be considered more abstract because they integrate information into semantically more complex units with little repetition or redundancy, and because they use more new metaphors. English texts have been consistently found to be more explicit, definite and specific. They include more determiners, demonstrative, comparative and personal reference, semantic links, markers of indirect speech, evaluation and modification.;Hebrew texts, on the other hand, strive towards indefinition and vagueness. This is achieved though limiting the use of modification and of markers of definition, through the use of repetitions coordination and stacked relativization, as well as a nonlineal word order with only a limited regard for developing a thematic climax.;The study takes as its starting point evaluations made of stylistic differences between Hebrew texts and Standard Average European texts. The evaluations point to differences along the oral/visual continuum, and suggest that they represent two different modes of literacy. Since the main indicators to those locations along the oral/visual continuum are differences in the levels of abstraction, specificity and definition, the study proceeds to identify and describe features of language which indicate increase or decrease in the levels of abstraction, specificity and definition to be compared in the source and target texts of the two languages. |
