J.D. Porter ; Yulia Ilchuk ; Quinn Dombrowski
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Linguistic Fingerprints on Translation's Lens
jdmdh:7223 -
Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities,
January 27, 2022,
Special Issue on Collecting, Preserving, and Disseminating Endangered Cultural Heritage for New Understandings through Multilingual Approaches
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https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.7223
Linguistic Fingerprints on Translation's LensArticle
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.