A Supervised Learning Approach Towards Profiling the Preservation of Authorial Style in Literary Translations

Recently there has been growing interest in the application of approaches from the text classification literature to fine-grained problems of textual stylometry. This paper seeks to answer a question which has concerned the translation studies community: how does a literary translator’s style vary across their translations of different authors? This study focuses on the works of Constance Garnett, one of the most prolific English-language translators of Russian literature, and uses supervised learning approaches to analyse her translations of three well-known Russian authors, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dosteyevsky and Anton Chekhov. This analysis seeks to identify common linguistic patterns which hold for all of the translations from the same author. Based on the experimental results, it is ascertained that both document-level metrics and n-gram features prove useful for distinguishing between authorial contributions in our translation corpus and their individual efficacy increases further when these two feature types are combined, resulting in classification accuracy of greater than 90 % on the task of predicting the original author of a textual segment using a Support Vector Machine classifier. The ratio of nouns and pronouns to total tokens are identified as distinguishing features in the document metrics space, along with occurrences of common adverbs and reporting verbs from the collection of n-gram features.