The Italian Retranslations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: A Corpus-based Literary Analysis

The research goal is to clarify how and to what degree the modernist style and features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are rendered in the eleven retranslations into Italian of this novel and whether these can be characterised as modernist novels themselves. A suitable methodology has been developed, which is drawn on the existing corpus methods for descriptive translation studies. Empirical evidence of the differences between target texts have been found, which in many cases have been interpreted as due to the translators’ voice or thumb-prints. The present research uses a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study both linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences will be analysed in this thesis in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics such as lexical variety and lexical frequency. The target texts were digitised, and the resulting text files were then analysed by using a bespoke, novel computer program, which is capable of the mentioned functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. Not only did this methodology enable performing in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features, but it also allowed a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons. The obtained empirical results identify a progressive source-text orientation of the retranslations of Woolf’s style in a few aspects of a few target texts. The translators’ presence affected all the eleven target texts in register and style under the influence of the Italian translation norms usually attributed to the translation of literary classics

Generalizing sampling-based multilingual alignment

International audienceSub-sentential alignment is the process by which multi-word translation units are extracted from sentence-aligned multilingual parallel texts. This process is required, for instance, in the course of training statistical machine translation systems. Standard approaches typically rely on the estimation of several probabilistic models of increasing complexity and on the use of various heuristics, that make it possible to align, first isolated words, then, by extension, groups of words. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach which relies on a much simpler principle: the comparison of occurrence profiles in sub-corpora obtained by sampling. After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, we show how to improve the detection of multi-word translation units and evaluate these improvements on machine translation tasks