Invisible Translator, Visible Author: Medieval Authorship Verification Through Modern Translation
Brian J. Reilly · Digital philology · 2018
Could invisible translators be the key to seeing invisible medieval authors? Medieval manuscripts and modern editions give us texts that combine signals of original authorship with interfering signals of scribal authorship, dialectical variation, etc. This article suggests a way to use medieval texts in modern translation to isolate authentic signals of authorship. By using translation as a signal-processing filter and applying previously tested stylometric techniques based on character n-grams, the present study detects a different signal for Guillaume d'Angleterre than those found for other texts attributed to Chrétien de Troyes, suggesting different authorship.