Corpus Statistics in Contrastive Literary Studies

Abstract

Abstract Abstract The present article seeks to establish a novel line of investigation into the rationale behind the variation in the stylistic use of language by literary translators. Despite its omnipresence in textual studies, stylistic variation, which may be construed as a special form of literary creativity in translation, seems to have been rarely explored from a quantitative linguistic point of view. This study has been pursued under the assumption that when explanations offered by closely related contextual factors, i.e. the use of certain linguistic devices in the original text or in previous translations of the same work, have failed to explain the stylistic variation detected in one's work, it is possible that the translator has resorted to other situational features of the source text, rather than relying solely upon linguistic cues, in an attempt to build a distinctive stylistic profile of his or her work. The substantiation of such hypothesis has been achieved through the application of categorical principal component analysis (CATPCA), which is widely used in social or behaviour sciences, within the context of corpus-based textual analysis.