The stylistics and stylometry of collaborative translation: Woolf's Night and Day in Polish

Abstract

The study investigates to what extent traditional stylistics and non-traditional stylometry can co-operate in the study of translations in terms of translatorial style. Stylistic authorship attribution methods based on a multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies are used in attempts at identifying translators. While these methods usually identify the author of the original rather than the translator, a case study is presented of the Polish translation of a single novel by Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, in which one translator took over from the other; the point of this takeover has been successfully identified with the above-mentioned methods.