Computational stylistics in the translator’s work (on the basis of the author’s own translations)

Abstract

This paper presents a stylometric analysis of two “most literary spy novels” by John le Carre, A Perfect Spy (1986) and Absolute Friends (2003). Written 17 years apart, they were translated by the author of this paper into Polish less than months one from the other in 2003 and 2004. From the very start, it was evident for the translator that the two novels would be an interesting subject of study due to their being built according to a very similar model, especially where characterization is concerned. Both feature a slightly foolish British agent (le Carre’s famous trademark), his highly intellectual yet physically handicapped East German nemesis, the British agent’s boss/friend, etc. Since these two very similar works shared their Polish translator – who continued to experience a very strong feeling of deja vu while working on the two novels, this case seemed perfect for a study of stylistic relationships between original and translation. The main effect observed in this study was that of the three above-mentioned couples of corresponding characters, two are very expectedly similar, while one (the two East-German double agents) is not. Their similarity is “regained” in the translation – an interesting corroboration of the translator’s “intuitive” suspicion during his work on the Polish version. These results show that, at least in this – very special – case, the accuracy of studies performed by Multidimensional Scaling of correlation matrices of relative frequencies of the most frequent words is quite considerable when applied to translation. This is true despite the disquieting fact that, like previous statistical authorship attribution techniques, this correspondence lacks any compelling theoretical justification. The tentative explanations proposed so far by van Leuven-Zwart’s postulate of microstructural changes influencing the text’s macrostructure, 1995) or by McKenna, Burrows and Antonia are certainly not enough. Since overlapping semantic fields of the most frequent words of texts and divergent linguistic systems make one-on-one correspondences impossible, a more general underlying mechanism must be found. At the same time, empirical studies hinting at the existence of such a mechanism have still been very few. This is why more are needed to explain the compelling yet somewhat mysterious successes of Burrows’s “old” method.