Equilibrium and dynamic methods when comparing an English text and its Esperanto translation

Abstract

A comparison of two English texts written by Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in Wonderland), also translated into Esperanto, the other (Through the Looking Glass) are discussed in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantly differ from each other. One dimensional time series like signals are constructed using only word frequencies (FTS) or word lengths (LTS). The data is studied through (i) a Zipf method for sorting out correlations in the FTS and (ii) a Grassberger–Procaccia (GP) technique based method for finding correlations in LTS. The methods correspond to an equilibrium and a dynamic approach respectively to human texts features. There are quantitative statistical differences between the original English text and its Esperanto translation, but the qualitative differences are very minutes. However different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents for the ranking properties, and the phase space attractor dimensionality. The Zipf exponent can take values much less than unity (∼0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. This variety in exponents can be conjectured to be an intrinsic measure of the book style or purpose, rather than the language or author vocabulary richness, since a similar exponent is obtained whatever the text. Moreover the attractor dimension r is a simple function of the so called phase space dimension n , i.e., r = n λ , with λ = 0.79 . Such an exponent could also be conjectured to be a measure of the author style versatility, — here well preserved in the translation.