Literary Digital Stylistics in Translation Studies

This book presents a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts, such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences are analysed quantitatively in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics, such as tests of time trends, lexical variety, and lexical frequency. The target texts are digitised, and the resulting text files are then analysed using a bespoke, novel computer program capable of the functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. This methodology enables in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features and allows a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons.

Introduction.- Extending the digital literary studies to extra-linguistic features.- An innovation of digital stylistics in literary translation studies.- The quantitative analysis in close, meso, and distant reading Integrating quantitative and qualitative literary analyses.- Rendering the style of To the Lighthouse in retranslations.- Conclusion.- References.- Appendixes.

Anna Maria Cipriani is a translator officer of the Italian Ministry of Defence and has worked on a research project on Translation Studies at University College, London. She has published academic articles and translations of books from English into Italian, including Charles Van Doren’s A History of Knowledge (Armando, 2006), and from French into English, including Henri Duday’s The Archaeology of the Dead (Oxbow, 2009).