A clustering approach for translationese identification

Our paper is concerned with investigating the impact of translationese on the novels of a bilingual writer and asking whether one could determine the authorship of a translated document. The main part of our paper will be centered on selecting a good set of lexical features that can be considered characteristic for an author. We used in our research the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, a bilingual author, who wrote his works in both Russian and English. Each text is represented by a vector of function words. We are interested in determining how the results vary across different feature sets and which feature set could be considered the most representative. In order to inspect our results we used a hierarchical clustering method and draw conclusions based on the most frequent result.