Quantifying english and polish lolitas: A corpus-driven stylistic comparison

Abstract

The study presented in this article,which is a fragment of a larger study of translational and non-translational texts (Grabowski 2012), falls within the scope of descriptive translation studies (DTS) and corpus linguistics, with particular emphasis on the study of translation universals, on the example of English-original (written in 1955) and two independent Polish translations of the novel Lolita by V. Nabokov (by Stiller in 1991 and Kłobukowski in 1997). According to Baker (1995: 243), universal features of translation or translation universals, constitute specific textual characteristics (e.g. lexical, grammatical or stylistic) typical of translated texts, irrespective of languages involved in the translation process. In this study, which was completed with the use of corpus linguistics methodology, the texts were compared in terms of basic stylometric indicators presented through descriptive statistics, top-frequency wordlists, frequency profiles and frequency spectra. More specifically, the analysis aimed to compare the English-original and two Polish translations of Lolita in terms of text length, sentence length, number of repetitions (conciseness of style) as well as frequencies and distribution of both word-types (distinct words) and word-tokens (running words). Also, the aim was to find traces, if any, of translation universals (S-universals, after Chesterman 2004) attested in the Polish translations. The article concludes with suggestions as to research on translation universals in literary texts with the use of corpus linguistics methodology.