Linguistic Fingerprints on Translation's Lens

J.D. Porter (1) , Yulia Ilchuk (1) , Quinn Dombrowski (1)

1 Stanford University

What happens to the language fingerprints of a work when it is translated into another language? While translation studies has often prioritized concepts of equivalence (of form and function), and of textual function, digital humanities methodologies can provide a new analytical lens onto ways that stylistic traces of a text's source language can persist in a translated text. This paper presents initial findings of a project undertaken by the Stanford Literary Lab, which has identified distinctive grammatical features in short stories that have been translated into English. While the phenomenon of "translationese" has been well established particularly in corpus translation studies, we argue that digital humanities methods can be valuable for identifying specific traits for a vision of a world atlas of literary style.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Littératures

J.D. Porter, Yulia Ilchuk, Quinn Dombrowski. Linguistic Fingerprints on Translation's Lens. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, In press, Special Issue on Collecting, Preserving, and Disseminating Endangered Cultural Heritage for New Understandings through Multilingual Approaches, ⟨10.46298/jdmdh.7223⟩. ⟨hal-03151249v2⟩