Abstract
In this chapter Winters explores the usefulness of corpus linguistics methodologies for analyzing literary texts and their translations. The case study is based on two autobiographical novels by Natascha Wodin and their translations into English by two different translators. A corpus-based analysis of these texts has been carried out with a largely data-driven approach, revealing stylistic differences in lexical and syntactical creativity. This chapter focuses on the latter, addressing, in particular, sentence structure, punctuation and repetition. These stylistic features impact on the way the autobiographical I is being portrayed in the text. On the basis of an interview with the author, discussions of mind-style and narratives shed further light on the effects of the stylistic differences that emerged from the corpus linguistic analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
I have provided my own translation here because the translated footnote in The Interpreter reads differently: “I originally intended to publish this book under my own maiden name, Wdowin; but the German publisher insisted that I simplify the spelling to make it easier for German readers to read and pronounce. This change I regard as part of my story.” (Brownjohn 1986: 26) In Brownjohn’s translation, the explicitly stated cultural transfer from Russian (russischen Mädchennamen Natascha Wdowin) to germanization (eindeutsche) is omitted.
- 2.
Accuracy of information on Wodin in Literaturport.de confirmed by Wodin.
- 3.
I would like to thank David Woolls for adding repetition and sentence length analysis functions to Tetrapla earlier this year, without which the present study would not have been possible.
- 4.
Serving as a reference corpus , GEPCOLT-DE and GEPCOLT-EN exclude the novel by Wodin for the current analysis. Roth1 and Bayer were unavailable and therefore also excluded. I would like to thank Prof Dorothy Kenny for providing access to GEPCOLT.
- 5.
Design parameters of the BNC-baby literary subcorpus:
Texts for the fiction component were selected from texts classified as “written imaginative”, published as books between 1985–1994, as having been produced for an adult audience, and having the genre label W fict prose. From this set of 356 texts, a random sample of about one million words (25 texts) was drawn. The sample was checked to ensure no more than one title by any particular author was selected. (Burnard 2003: 5)
- 6.
Not necessarily all instances function as a sentence marker as the programme cannot distinguish between functions as full stop and digital point, for example, but it should be safe to assume that the great majority does.
- 7.
Paragraph numbering refers to the aligned versions of Einmal lebt ich and Once I lived held in electronic format.
- 8.
GT = gloss translation; gloss translations are my translations.
- 9.
The next step would be to also analyze those instances with the same level of repetition in source and target texts as these instances might still include differences in the type of repetition if, for example, source-text repetition was omitted in the translation but other instances of repetition possibly also due to the English language structure were introduced.
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Winters, M. (2018). The Case of Natascha Wodin’s Autobiographical Novels: A Corpus-Stylistics Approach. In: Boase-Beier, J., Fisher, L., Furukawa, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_8
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