A Third Glance at a Stylometric Map of Native and Translated Literature in Polish
Jan Rybicki · 2021
This chapter presents a large-scale quantitative approach to literary translation. Most-frequent-word-based stylometry is used to distant read over 3,000 texts in Polish: originals by Polish writers and translations into Polish from several European languages. The patterns observed in network analysis of cluster-analysed distance measures suggest that texts translated into a language differ in most-frequent-word usage frequency from texts originally written in that language and from translations from other languages. This is an interesting stylometric manifestation of the phenomenon of translationese. Despite this difference, however, texts translated from some national literatures (French or English/American) exhibit an interesting parallelism to those periods in Polish literature which saw a heightened impact of either one or the other.