Stylometry in translation: The great mystery of the (almost) invisible translator

Rybicki, Jan

doi:10.1075/scl.51.09ryb

In:Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A practical guide to descriptive translation research
Edited by Michael P. Oakes and Meng Ji
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 51] 2012
► pp. 231–248

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The great mystery of the (almost) invisible translator

Stylometry in translation

Jan Rybicki | Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland

Published online: 20 March 2012

https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.51.09ryb

Machine-learning stylometric distance methods based on most-frequent-word frequencies are well-accepted and successful in authorship attribution. This study investigates the results of one of these methods, Burrows’s Delta, when applied to translations. Basing the empirical results on a number of corpora of literary translations, it shows that, except for some few highly adaptative translations, Delta usually fails to identify the translator and identifies the author of the original instead.

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