Corpus stylistic analysis of literary translation using multilevel linguistic measures

Abstract

Abstract Previous studies in corpus-based literary translation have tended to focus on only one or two specific aspects of style. In this study we expand the existing analytical paradigm to show how the style inherent in source texts (STs) is reflected in their translations. We do this using thirty-six multilevel linguistic features. The selected texts are James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and their Korean translations. We find that the general stylistic patterns in the STs are mirrored in the target texts (TTs) in terms of several linguistic measures, but that some aspects of style are not reflected in the TTs. The stylistic discrepancies between the STs and TTs may signify the translator’s strategic decisions to adhere to the target language (TL) norms and translation conventions as well as to preserve the style in the ST.