The Transfer of Style in Literary Translation: Application of CAT Tools and Parallel Corpora Cover Image

Převod stylu v literárním překladu: využití paralelních korpusů a dalších elektronických nástrojů
The Transfer of Style in Literary Translation: Application of CAT Tools and Parallel Corpora

Author(s): Jitka Zehnalová
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Translation Studies
Published by: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Nakladatelství Karolinum
Keywords: literary translation; Czech authors in English translations; authorial style; translator’s style; CAT tools; small-scale corpora

Summary/Abstract: The contribution deals with the use of electronic tools for investigating the transfer of authorial style in literary translation. It first introduces a method of sentence length analysis of source texts and target texts by means of graphs created by the combined use of the Excel application and of translation memories (TM) created in the CAT tool Memsource Cloud. The applicability of the method is demonstrated on samples of Bohumil Hrabal’s texts Cutting It Short and I Served the King of England translated into English by James Naughton and Paul Wilson respectively, and further tested for the purposes of investigating translator’s style on other texts by Hrabal (The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Times of the Cult) and texts by other Czech authors translated by these translators (Miroslav Holub’s text The Jingle Bell Principle and Ivan Klima’s text Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light). Secondly, the quantitative data obtained from TM are summed up in tables and the ways of interpreting it and using it for comparative stylistic analyses are demonstrated. The author comes to the conclusion that the presented methods are useful for exploring translators’ style and the transfer of authorial style in translation. Their time-consuming nature is more than balanced off by the quantity and relevance of the obtained results. Their effectiveness can be enhanced by using the TMs as a first step in compiling small-scale corpora, i.e., as files imported into corpus managers, e.g., Sketch Engine, capable of compiling parallel tagged corpora of single texts/ authors/translators and possibly by using the TMs for compiling manual multilevel annotation corpora, e.g., in the Graph Anno tool.

  • Issue Year: 2018
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 101-115
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Czech