Translator’s Stylometric Invisibility Cover Image

Stylometryczna niewidzialność tłumacza
Translator’s Stylometric Invisibility

Author(s): Jan Rybicki
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: stylometry; most frequent words; cluster analysis; authorial signal; translatorial signal

Summary/Abstract: In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between the frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary texts in English, French and Polish.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 27
  • Page Range: 61–87
  • Page Count: 27
  • Language: Polish