What it is
Rhetorical schemes are patterns of form: parallelism, anaphora, repetition, antithesis, chiasmus, alliteration, rhyme, metrical rhythm. They organize the surface of a text without altering what its words denote, which separates them from tropes. A scheme change is the decision taken about such a pattern, and Chesterman sets out four options: retain the scheme, replace it with a different one, drop it, or introduce one where the source has none.
A filing note is needed, because the taxonomy is counter-intuitive here. Chesterman numbers this strategy G10, at the end of the syntactic group, even though its effect is rhetorical rather than grammatical. The placement follows from his organizing criterion: schemes are realized in the arrangement of surface form, and the syntactic group is where operations on form belong. A reader who knows the classification will look for scheme change there, alongside clause and sentence structure change rather than alongside trope change, which is S9 in the semantic group.
The distinction from trope change is worth holding firmly, since the two are routinely conflated as figurative language. A scheme is a figure of arrangement, a trope a figure of meaning, and a translation can keep every image while losing every cadence. Where a scheme cannot be carried at its own point, the response is compensation: the pattern is rebuilt where the target language permits it.
When it applies
- A sound pattern carries the point, as in slogans, titles and mnemonic formulae.
- The source repeats deliberately, and target editorial norms would treat the repetition as an oversight.
- Rhythm is part of the genre, as in ceremonial text.
- The target genre expects a scheme the source lacks, most visibly the doublets and triplets of traditional legal English.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
- Target: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
- Comment: A tricolon whose members share a suffix, so the pattern is both rhythmic and morphological. The received English rendering keeps the triad and the parallel ending in two of the three members. The scheme is the point of the phrase; a reformulation breaking the parallelism would fail whatever it did to the sense.
DE>EN
- Source: null und nichtig
- Target: null and void
- Comment: Both legal traditions use alliterating near-synonymous doublets, so the scheme transfers with the content. The reverse deserves care: rendering a single source term by a target doublet adds a scheme, Chesterman's fourth option, and in an operative provision a doublet can be read as imposing two requirements rather than one.
NL>EN
- Source: Wie het kleine niet eert, is het grote niet weerd.
- Target: He who does not honour the small is not worthy of the great.
- Comment: The Dutch proverb rhymes and the established English rendering does not: the scheme is dropped and the proposition preserved. That is ordinarily acceptable, and stops being so in a passage that discusses the saying as a saying, where the form is the evidence that this is received wisdom.
TR>EN
- Source: Yavaş yavaş ilerliyoruz.
- Target: We are making steady progress.
- Comment: Turkish reduplication is a grammaticalized device, not a flourish. Copying it as "slowly, slowly" imports an insistence the source does not have. Deciding whether a repetition belongs to the morphology or to the rhetoric is the first judgement this strategy demands.
Watch out for
Not every repeated element is a scheme. Grammaticalized reduplication, terminological consistency and the recurrence of a defined term carry no rhetorical value, and treating them as ornament produces a spurious emphasis or an unwanted variation. Conversely, a genuine scheme can look like carelessness to a reviser reading for style alone.
- Added schemes read as authorial voice. Alliteration the source did not have makes the translator audible, defensible as compensation and indefensible as decoration.
- Legal drafting repeats on purpose. Removing a repetition for elegance invites the question whether the two occurrences were meant to differ, and that question is an expensive one.
- Compensation is legitimate and must be traceable. A scheme rebuilt three sentences away answers a real constraint only if the decision is recorded rather than absorbed silently into the text.
References
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.