Translation and linguistic innovation : the rise and fall of Russian loanwords in literary translation into Dutch

This paper examines the use of Russian loanwords in Dutch translations of Russian literary texts from the period 1970-2009. In an increasingly globalized world, as more information is exchanged across cultural borders worldwide, one might expect a growth in the number and use of loanwords, even between cultures that are relatively distant from each other such as Dutch and Russian. In the case study conducted, which was based on a representative corpus of 20 Dutch translations of Russian novels, we found that while there was a relative growth in the number of loanwords used in the 1970's and 1980's, the trend since the 1990's has been downwards. In the earlier period the public's interest in dissident Russian literature and in the cultural developments of the Glasnost period was intense, which in turn stimulated literary translators to use foreignizing translation strategies, bringing the (Russian) source text closer to the (Dutch) target public. With the rise of new genres (postmodernism and crime novels) in Russian literature and the changes in publishing policies this tendency diminished and the number of loanwords in translation decreased, which indicates a rise of domesticating translation strategies in Dutch culture in recent decades

Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower’s Middle English Corpus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature. This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing to reexamine the Confessio’s themes, adding data analysis to the more traditional close reading strategies of Gower scholarship. We use Gower’s work as a case study both to help reduce the potential variants across textual versions and to more deeply investigate the corpus than distant reading normally allows. Here, we share our initial findings as well as our methodologies. We hope to share resources that will allow other scholars to engage in similar types of projects

Introduction : literary texts and their translations as an object of research

This special issue of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics offers seven state-of-the-art contributions on the current linguistic study of literary translation. Although the articles are based on similar data – literary source texts and their translations – they focus on diverse aspects of literary translation, study a range of linguistic phenomena and utilize different methodologies. In other words, it is an important goal of this special issue to illuminate the current diversity of possible approaches in the linguistic study of translated literary texts within the discipline of translation studies. At the same time, new theoretical and empirical insights are opened to the study of the linguistic phenomena chosen by the authors of the articles and their representation or use in literary texts and translations. The analyzed features range from neologisms to the category of passive and from spoken language features to the representation of speech and multilingualism in writing. Therefore, the articles in this issue are not only relevant for the study of literary translation or translation theory in general, but also for the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies – or most importantly, for the cross-disciplinary co-operation between these three fields of study. The common theme that all these articles share is how the translation process shapes, transfers and changes the linguistic properties of literary texts as compared to their sources texts, other translations or non-translated literary texts in the same language and how this question can be approached in research. All articles provide new information about the forces that direct and affect translators’ textual choices and the previously formulated hypotheses about the functioning of such forces. The articles illustrate how translators may perform differently from authors and how translators’ and authors’ norms may diverge at different times and in different cultures. The question of how translation affects the linguistic properties of literary translations is approached from the viewpoint of previously proposed claims or hypotheses about translation. In the following, we will introduce these viewpoints for readers who are not familiar with the recent developments in translation studies. At the same time, we will shortly present the articles in this issue

Vulgaris: Analysis of a Corpus for Middle-Age Varieties of Italian Language

Italian is a Romance language that has its roots in Vulgar Latin. The birth of the modern Italian started in Tuscany around the 14th century, and it is mainly attributed to the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio, who are among the most acclaimed authors of the medieval age in Tuscany. However, Italy has been characterized by a high variety of dialects, which are often loosely related to each other, due to the past fragmentation of the territory. Italian has absorbed influences from many of these dialects, as also from other languages due to dominion of portions of the country by other nations, such as Spain and France. In this work we present Vulgaris, a project aimed at studying a corpus of Italian textual resources from authors of different regions, ranging in a time period between 1200 and 1600. Each composition is associated to its author, and authors are also grouped in families, i.e. sharing similar stylistic/chronological characteristics. Hence, the dataset is not only a valuable resource for studying the diachronic evolution of Italian and the differences between its dialects, but it is also useful to investigate stylistic aspects between single authors. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the data, and a corpus-driven study in dialectology and diachronic varieties

Introduction

No abstract available

Registerial adaptation vs. innovation across situational contexts : 18th century women in transition

Endeavors to computationally model language variation and change are ever increasing. While analyses of recent diachronic trends are frequently conducted, long-term trends accounting for sociolinguistic variation are less well-studied. Our work sheds light on the temporal dynamics of language use of British 18th century women as a group in transition across two situational contexts. Our findings reveal that in formal contexts women adapt to register conventions, while in informal contexts they act as innovators of change in language use influencing others. While adopted from other disciplines, our methods inform (historical) sociolinguistic work in novel ways. These methods include diachronic periodization by Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine periods of change and relevant features of variation, and event cascades as influencer models.Peer reviewe

Why DO dove: Evidence for register variation in Early Modern English negatives

The development of “supportive” (or “periphrastic”) DO in English suffered a curious and sharp reversal late in the 16th century in negative declaratives and questions according to Ellegård's (1953) database, with a recovery late in the following century. This article examines the variation between DO and the full verb in negative declaratives in this database, from 1500 to 1710. It is shown that both register variation and age-grading are relevant, and that the periods 1500–1575 and 1600–1710 have radically distinct properties. The second period shows substantial age-grading, and is interpreted as having introduced a fresh evaluative principle governing register variation. Negative questions supply data that suggest that the development of clitic negation may have been implicated in the development of the new evaluation. This change in evaluation accounts for the apparent reversal in the development of DO, and we can abandon the view that it was a consequence of grammatical restructuring

Same time, across time: simultaneity clauses from late modern to present-day english

In this paper we offer a diachronic analysis of simultaneity subordinator as against the background of simultaneity subordinators while, whilst, when from 1650 to the end of the 20th century. The present survey makes use of data extracted from the British English component of ARCHER (version 3.1), focusing in particular on fiction, the register par excellence for the use of simultaneity subordinators. We analyse our data according to a selection of parameters (ordering, verb type, duration, tense and aspect, subject identity, simultaneity type) and show that, against a background of relatively stability, the major change is a dramatic increase in the frequency of simultaneity as-clauses from the first half of the 19th century onwards. Adapting the historical work on stylistic change by Biber and Finegan (1989, 1997), as well as theoretical and experimental accounts of the semantics of English simultaneity markers, we highlight an interesting parallelism between the spread of as-clauses in oral narrative from childhood to adulthood and the spread of as-clauses in modern fiction. In either case, the spread of as may be symptomatic of an evolution in narrative techniques, particularly in respect of the means by which complex events are typically represented

The modernist short story in Italy: the case of the 'Edizioni di Solaria'

This article investigates the role played by the modernist periodical Solaria (1926–34) as the Italian short story was being modernized. By offering a descriptive survey of the rarely studied corpus of fifteen short narrative volumes printed by the ‘Edizioni di Solaria’, the periodical’s minor publishing house, it sheds new light on the development of the short genre in this particular context. The two key questions addressed are, on the one hand, the validity of a recent hypothesis proposing Italo Svevo as a model for the ‘Solarian’ short story, and, on the other, the relationship between the codified novella/raccontoand other forms of short narrative prose derived from early twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation