Interfacing corpus linguistics and computational stylistics

Abstract

This study attempts to examine the potential of selected corpus linguistics and computational stylistics methods in the investigation of translation universals in translational literary Polish. It deals with T-universals (Chesterman 2004), with emphasis on the simplification hypothesis, as manifested in the core patterns of lexical use (Laviosa 1998) and the levelling out hypothesis (Baker 1996). To that end, the purpose-designed corpora, each with approximately 350,000 tokens, of contemporary translational and non-translational literary Polish were compiled. The results confirm the simplification and the levelling out hypotheses but only with reference to the mean sentence length and variance for the mean sentence length. On the other hand, the results of multivariate analyses (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) confirm the levelling out hypothesis that translations are more alike as compared with native texts.